NOTE: This review is based on an ARC provided by the publisher. Changes may have been made to the final version.
Call it two and a half stars. I started out really liking this blend of cyberpunk and pure sci-fi, but it lost me around the halfway mark. There's too much going on in this book: hackers and space travel and extragalactic colonies, clones and mindwiping and alien viruses and I don't know what all. (I think the clone is what started me going, "Wait, what, really?") There are even too many main characters, too many POVs, and the ones not introduced in the first chapter felt like hangers-on, poseurs.
Even when I was enjoying this, it was only ever interesting, never exciting. I liked all the cyberpunk elements; I was curious to know the Source of the virus. I even wanted to know more about the Beast, but by the time that was revealed, I'd stopped caring. The mindwipe is, I think, where this novel lost me. It felt like a climax, and the rest of the plot was just sort of there. There was a second climax, involving the Beast, but like I said, I didn't care by that point. The lack of excitement was really getting to me, and the whole selective lack of memory deal (seriously, the events that happened with the cannon, his wife and son, but not anything else in his life?) just seemed to be an excuse to drag things out.
In all, this was a valiant effort, but really not worth it. And the relationship between Rix and Niko is CREEPY.