Thank you for such a thoughtful and honest review, and especially for reading the book all the way through. I genuinely appreciate the care you brought to engaging with it. You’re absolutely right that the latter half asks the reader to accept a mechanism that isn’t fully unpacked within this volume. That ambiguity was intentional rather than an oversight. The Umbra Signal is designed as the first movement in a larger architecture, where some of the “how” is deliberately withheld in favor of unsettling the reader with the consequences first. Without giving anything away, the questions you raise about agency, mechanism, and plausibility are ones the series continues to interrogate more directly. Your reaction tells me you were wrestling with the right ideas, even if they didn’t fully resolve for you here. Thank you again for engaging so deeply; thoughtful critiques like this are part of what makes conversations around ambitious science fiction meaningful.
Thank you for such a thoughtful and honest review, and especially for reading the book all the way through. I genuinely appreciate the care you brought to engaging with it.
You’re absolutely right that the latter half asks the reader to accept a mechanism that isn’t fully unpacked within this volume. That ambiguity was intentional rather than an oversight. The Umbra Signal is designed as the first movement in a larger architecture, where some of the “how” is deliberately withheld in favor of unsettling the reader with the consequences first.
Without giving anything away, the questions you raise about agency, mechanism, and plausibility are ones the series continues to interrogate more directly. Your reaction tells me you were wrestling with the right ideas, even if they didn’t fully resolve for you here.
Thank you again for engaging so deeply; thoughtful critiques like this are part of what makes conversations around ambitious science fiction meaningful.
David