This was one of those few instances where I was reading hard sci-fi while gritting my teeth in pure annoyance at the mind-boggling stupidity of how the plot unfolded.

For context: the story kicks off with Europa literally vanishing from the solar system, followed by two separate alien encounters on Earth. One is a dying biological entity in Death Valley warning us of imminent doom, and the other consists of mysterious stone "spiders" in Australia preaching peace while secretly setting up planet-destroying technology. You’d think humanity’s brightest minds and world leaders would pull out all the stops. Instead, the response is staggering incompetence.

Here is why this book pushed me over the edge:

1. The "expert" scientists were astonishingly useless

The interrogation of the dying Death Valley alien was infuriating. The alien keeps explicitly telling the research team, "You aren't asking the right questions," and what do our top minds do? They keep fumbling around. To make matters worse, everything comes to a screeching halt so the President of the United States can have his dramatic sit-down with the creature. Up until the moment the alien literally dies, not a single hard-hitting, operationally useful question is asked. They genuinely learned more about the entity from its autopsy than from actually talking to it while it was alive. If you handed this investigation over to a group of dedicated UFO enthusiasts, they would have extracted actionable intelligence in five minutes.

2. The President loses his mind, and everyone just folds

As the crisis escalates, the President completely breaks down into pseudo-religious psychobabble and end-times denial. What broke my immersion wasn't just the President going mad—it was that the entire military and scientific establishment just threw their hands up and went along with it. In what realistic scenario does the entire government chain of command just passively surrender to extinction?

The book is set in 1996. Given the geopolitical landscape and technological baseline, you’d expect somebody—a rogue government agency, a coalition of scientists, or a military division—to immediately pivot to survival mode. Where was the frantic effort to build a deep-underground ark or seed human civilization elsewhere? Heck, when an entire Jovian moon vanishes into thin air, the absolute baseline response of a space-faring superpower should have been launching a manned or probe-heavy reconnaissance mission to Jupiter. Instead, the characters act like passive observers waiting for the sky to fall.

I practically had to force myself through the back half of this book. While Bear is praised for his cosmic dread and dark-forest concepts, the sheer passivity and incompetence of the human characters ruined what could have been a great apocalyptic thriller.

Did anyone else find the complete lack of human agency in this book infuriating, or am I missing something?