I found the overall story very compelling, but I was frequently pulled out of it by trying to work out details of what was going on. While the tech was believable, the explanations felt a little overdone and distracted from the story itself, while other times there was no explanation at all. Perhaps it could have done with a glossary.
That said, I was very interested in the overall premise and I liked that it was a shorter story.

2042 paints a believable portrait of the state of social media in seventeen years. Moving beyond text and video, media is transmited directly to the brain. With all the experimentation going on with companies like Neurolink, it's easy to picture this coming and question who controls the messaging on these new channels.
The novel presents these issues, but does not preach. Instead, we get the story of characters set within this new reality. At just over 200 pages, it made for an enjoyable and relatively compact read. The story arc was satisfied, however it came across as the potential first book in a series. If so, I'd likely read the follow-up.

2042 - Artemis Rising by M. A. Mitchell

I had a chance to read an advance copy of 2042 - Artemis Rising. It is a science fiction novel set in the near future where scientists develop a new method to bypass the optic nerve and give visually impaired people the ability to see. This technological miracle becomes a device to transmit information to everyone who can afford it.

As with all technology their ethical and moral issues. It reminded me of the current debate around AI and how do you balance creating an AI model with compensating content creators. The book is a bit slow to start as each chapter focuses on a different individual's part in this story but picks up about midway thru the book as the characters have been fully developed. It is a good read and intriguing premise. I look forward to what I expect will be several books on this theme.

This book was so promising. The premise is super cool. The new form of media known as “casting” is something like VR but more. It gives you all the senses of the person’s cast you are watching( except smell, they haven’t figured that one out yet). It does this by stimulating different parts of the brain. They were also able to cure many medical issues using this tech. I feel like this book would’ve been so much better had it been longer. There were so many different perspectives for such a short book. It made it really hard to get into or connect with any of the characters. The other issue I had with it was the science part was pretty heavy for me. I say this as someone who was never great at science, and tech is a foreign language to me. So this may not be an issue for most, but a lot of the tech speak went over my head. If the story had been a bit longer, and we’d really gotten to know all of these people, or if they’d skipped the pov’s of people that didn’t really matter as much to the story, I feel like it could’ve been a 3.5-4 star read for me. I really appreciate Net Galley for sending me the book, and while this one wasn’t for me, I hope it finds it’s readers out there.