I just finished Jennifer Brissett’s Elysium (vague spoilers follow). It seems to be well regarded and recieved several awards and nominations, but I was not terribly impressed by it. It was certainly very ambitious, and had interesting and coherent ideas. But I thought it lacked emotional resonance, it felt like an experiment but not one that the writer was up to. The writing was workmanlike at best and much of the dialogue was in cliches. Perhaps that was intentional as we find out eventually that many of the speakers are constructs, but the non-constructs spoke similarly. Moreover, surely a computer construct that was so complex as to create a world would be capable of generating decent dialogue. I wonder if it would have been better as Brissett’ third or fourth book rather than her first.