This was actually my second reading. I saw it marked as read in my Airtable, and I couldn’t remember it, even after searching for a description of it. Fine Structure has a lot of big ideas and disparate threads that eventually come together, but they never become so intertwined as to feel like one cohesive story. Which is to say, I couldn’t keep straight in my memory which plots were from Fine Structure, and which were from qntm’s collection of shorts, Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories. That’s not a knock—I enjoyed Fine Structure on both read-throughs (and I did remember it as I read it again). It’s not the first of qntm’s novels that I’d recommend (that would be There Is No Antimemetics Division). Where qntm’s other work can be mind-expanding, presenting wholly novel concepts that alter one’s perception of the universe, this one’s big ideas—about higher dimensions and the multiverse, among others—feel more like ideas to be studied at arm’s length than to be knitted into the fabric of one’s own mind. Still, this one spans 22,000 years and incorporates superheroes, extradimensional beings, information as an aspect of physics, heaven as an aspect of physics, and horror, and somehow it works.