While reading this, I kept thinking of Martin Starr's Silicon Valley talking about his obsession with "hard sci-fi." There is definitely a lot of science in this book. As a non-scientist, I can't speak to the veracity of any of it, especially because I zoned out during so many of those passages. It was like the songs in Tolkien books, but if they were mostly made of numbers. But my real issues with this book is the characters...or lack thereof. There are a lot of people in this book, but no fully realized characters. The author is clearly much more interested in the puzzle box of science that they have created and the people they have chosen to convey this were very much an afterthought. And that's just a flaw that I can never get past in a book. I don't care how detailed and meticulous your plotting is, if you can't give me characters to care about. Also...there's kind of a plot, but mostly it's just a mystery box set up for the future books in the series.