Well, I finished it and it was great! I also feel slightly smug for putting so much of the twist together but I don't think it would have made an unpleasant read to go in without knowing the end result.

(spoilers now!)

In terms of what I thought of the book - I found the second half, after the twist, was really fun and it felt like the stakes were truly life and death - you can actually give real consequences to character's choices when they can really die!

I found the variations on the romance to be really fascinating thing to focus - the version of Kodiak that snaps and has a breakdown felt like an important look at his character; see, even the strongest people can breakdown under stress!

I felt the ending was surprisingly hopeful, and answered a lot of my questions about how they were supposed to survive on this new planet after Earth is destroyed.

I think there were some elements that were set up that I found... not bad? But it felt like the author was not as interested in them as I was. The way that the clones who got to get old handled the situation with OS, for instance. It wasn't a bad solution to have the OS change its priorities when they reduced the total number of clones down to one spare set, but, well, it felt like the novel had set up a good horror premise there and didn't want to deliver on it bc it would end the story too early.

In some ways, this was a great exploration of what happens in a story where you CAN have multiple endings for the same set of characters, and I really enjoyed that even if I could have liked to give some of the later clone iterations a bit more time and space to see how their stories played out. It was experimental and I am really glad I read it without the spoilers.