This was such an impressive feat. So short, so tight, and yet telling a tale of an underclass revolting against a dystopian oppressive government on a capitalistic nightmare of a generation mining-ship that other authors might well have taken 500 pages to tell. The compression of plot, setting, and above all the highly abstract metaphorical (?) descriptions of the nature of viewpoint characters' development demands a lot of attention from the reader. Details that look like aesthetic world-building (e.g., children's games; previous research projects thought about in passing by the professor) turn out to underpin the key realizations of the climactic moments. Everything is important in a book like this. And if you open your mind enough to attend to it all, then the last line is deeply satisfying.