I am not sure what to make of this book. I liked it, unexpectedly, as it was off to a slow start. It was poetic in parts. Interesting ideas. A fascinating first contact story. It made me feel sad for long stretches. Confused in the beginning. Slow build-up, slow paced, with a twist at the ending that I saw coming, but that worked well.

The beginning was a little difficult to get into. I had to come to grips with the unusual vocabulary and odd grammar. It was a good way to impress the otherness of the setting to me. Hard SciFi, I guess. I liked Termagenti station, but even more so the setting down on Ash, with it's landscapes, memorable characters and the amazement of the station-born characters at encountering nature.

I liked the idea of the other characters taking up residence inside of Jhinsei. I wish the author had played around with that more. Maybe the book had felt more solid for me, if the author had explored that more deeply. But even so, lots to think about. I am sure this book is going to stay with me for some time.

World building with a lot of potential. I think I would like to pick up a sequel, to find out where the story takes the central characters.

I received this free e-copy from the publisher/author via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review, thank you!

I'm relatively new to scifi and I've been reading a fair variety of it from different decades. I've come to appreciate what it offers as a genre, particularly the social and political aspects (in relation to either ever improving technology or other futuristic aspects) approached from different perspectives. This book was by far the worst that I've come across. Tragic, really, because I'm a completist, meaning despite the fact that I pretty much didn't care for it from the first sentence, I still had to finish it, all that wasted time. At no point did it improve, nor offered some sort of redeeming quality. Then, at last, it ended. Almost reluctant to even review it, since it's just more time thrown away on it, but maybe at least it'll save someone the evening or two. So here goes...this book had a singular distinction of being so consistently WTF is going on that I still really can't offer so much as a plot summary. The author seems to have so giddily taken up word building that she forgot to tend to the basics like cohesive narrative, compelling characters, dynamic pacing. etc. And the world building, for all that effort, was disappointingly weak. Random linguistic tweaks that came across as typos or just lazy imaginings, weird names, peculiar motivations. This one almost read like it should have been published with its own glossary...or not at all. Vague, uninteresting, tedious, plodding, pretentious, much like the title itself...this book was a huge disappointment. I've come across random kindle freebies that in comparison read like compelling literature. This wasn't even that, this was a Netgalley find. A spectacular dud of a find. Pass.

Substrate Phantoms explores the idea of whether we are truly alone in this world, in a literal and metaphorical sense. What does it mean to be human? And are there others out there? These concepts are explored differently through a multitude of characters. Jhinsei, a twice orphaned guy struggles to find a true family, and what does family even mean? Mheth struggles to find a way to feel and handle his feelings, and whether or not he is a good person. And as the book explores their struggles, the author continues to explore what an "other" would be like.

The concept was so unique and refreshing, however the writing was lacking in continuity and pacing.

Full Review on my blog http://heathertooreal.blogspot.com/ will be up on 5/13, 12:00 PM EST