Something about this - pacing or structure - fell apart in the back half, but I was pleasantly surprised by the front half. The author's note at the end warmed me to the effort, particularly the character of Shell. This isn't a bad book. The writing is very sparse and keeps the characters and events at a distance; fundamentally I felt this is a developed version of the document that results from an idea dump more than a fully developed novel. There was such interesting stuff in here but we flit around far too much to appreciate it. Countless POVs alternating in short chapters try to give a superficial grasp of the world, when a more focused one in greater depth would have made this premise really sing for me. 

Of the characters, I most enjoyed Fin and Salvo, who felt fully formed in their relationship with each other and as individuals. I did not care for Fin's hackneyed romance arc with Joké, which felt like the result of a session 0 decision in an RPG to connect two characters somehow. Lawrence was not developed enough for me to have emotions about, and though the note made me like Shell better, her inner life was not detailed enough to make her background felt like it mattered to her arc. I liked Ragtime; it was a very pleasant take on an AI and functioned well as a vehicle for worldbuilding.

I liked Molly Southbourne because it was character-driven, if not depth-focused. Rosewater was character-driven as well, but I think at its heart was setting-focused; there was a particular context the author wanted to tell this story within. This book, meanwhile, was driven wholesale by setting and context. It's why we jump constantly around, and have a stronger sense of what's changed about the world than about where any of the characters are going to wind up at the book's end. This isn't even a true mystery, with more thriller & sci fi action beats than mystery red herrings or much salient investigation done. Too many weird sci fi things are happening that distract from the murders, which are (in a way) solved very early; all doubt is removed about 60% in. A crime story set in space and backdropped against a post-Nigerian civilization, and mysterious, yes; but not really a mystery. Expectations were set and not met; this is this book's biggest crime.

Sex functions in this book to create a bond that makes these characters matter to each other, and to my memory it functioned the same way in Rosewater. A shorthand of sorts. The brief description of imagined sex with a demon in this book makes a sort of sense when you realize the author is a psychiatrist; in this case, too, perhaps this functioned as shorthand to tell us about the character's mindset or experiential processing. It didn't work for me, but there's a reasonable chance that's reader error.

A good world and imaginative details neglected by a set-up and follow-through that felt like they existed under different principles. I would have liked to read the hypothetical second book of this series if it had been the first.