A spaceship is sent to investigate a mysterious object near Pluto. As they approach, the engineers find out that the oxygen tanks have been damaged, but fixing the tanks doesn’t change the fate of the ship. The crew is erased one by one until only the co-pilot is left alive.

This story definitely has good bones! I loved the premise and was excited to dig in as soon as I read the synopsis. As a big fan of sci-fi, I couldn't wait to find out what the mysterious object was, what happened to the ship, and how the co-pilot was able to survive alone.

I found the flow of the story to be a significant speed bump that I struggled with throughout the book. Despite this issue, I continued to read. Although I can't say things improved as the book progressed, I suppose I became used to this author's writing style and just tried to overlook it as the story continued.

After finishing the book, I'm glad to have completed it, and overall, I can still say I enjoyed the themes as they were presented. This was a unique horror/sci-fi story that brought up ideas and scenarios that I haven't really seen elsewhere - and that's not something you can say often! I think it was worth reading, and overall, issues aside, it was a good book. I appreciate being given the chance to read it.

The spaceship Seven Oceans is on its way to investigate and study an unusual object that has been spotted just beyond Pluto. However as they observe the phenomenon they pick up a distress signal.
I struggled with a few things in this book. First was the flow of the story. I found the language meant that I could not get engrossed in the tale since I found the sentence structure was short almost abrupt.
There was also the use of ‘Wicked’ with respect to the phenomenon. Is the author using the term trying to convey sentience or is an attempt to be up with the younger generations and they’re used of this word.
Possibly my greatest peeve was the description of the theoretical physicists. They arrived in lab coats to the station. No self respecting scientist would wear what is a protective garment designed to be worn in the laboratory as an ‘overcoat’ for travelling in, especially as the author then is at pains to explain that they would not be in a laboratory.
Overall this was not a story that I enjoyed.

This book was quite different from what I usually read. I had a bit of a hard time keeping up with the technical language at first, but once I got the hang of it, I could NOT put this book down. The spaceship Seven Oceans is sent to study a strange object that has appeared near Pluto, and as soon as they get closer, they get a distress call about an accident. Soon after, the crew dies except for Salin, the now acting pilot of the ship. I loved how the development of events keeps you hooked. Lamp describes beautifully the psychological struggles Salin has to face in order to keep herself sane in between all the horror that happens around her in the middle of nowhere. I must say the ending disappointed me a little, especially after all the struggles she went through, but it was the only logical ending for a thriller/horror sci-fi novel like this one. Also, there are some parts of the story that don't exactly makes sense... But I believe in space everything is different, being stuck by yourself in literally the middle of nothing is not something you struggle with every day. The book gave me a little bit of Interstellar nostalgia. Fans of science fiction books will love this one for sure.
Thank you to the author and Netgalley for allowing me to have this ARC of the book. It was truly entertaining and easy (for the most part) to read.

There's a moment in Symmetry where one of our lead characters bemoans the science fiction book she is reading: "I love sci-fi stories but this one doesn't present any new ideas... New ideas are supposed to be the core of sci-fi stories." If one thing can be said about Symmetry, where characterisation is often pretty thin and people react aggressively and strangely to each other, is that it does have an original idea at the heart of it. We're in the nearish future, and an anomaly pops up in the solar system, a glowing orb with a black dot in the centre, that looks different to different people and seems to have no mass. It is on a collision course with Pluto, but in forty years Earth and the Sun. After a mysterious opening with glowing threads causing minor disasters, we are plunged onto the spaceship investigating, which after the Pluto encounter is more or less destroyed when it encounters what appears to be an identical vessel on the other side of the anomaly. It appears to be a parallel universe and the anomaly is a fissure between the timelines, and these glowing threads appear to exist to synchronize the two universes with each other. The only issue is the sole survivors on each ship are two different (if physically about the same size) women. Can they maintain a synchronous position whilst solving the problem and not letting the effect destroy the Sun?

Symmetry is quite dumb in places, and its main innovation is this near-book-long attempt at the old silent film mirror gag. As the threads synchronize the two universes it also tries to synchronize the people, at which point new caveats and rules are posited to make the story work (brains are hard to synchronize, and information is treated differently to matter). There seems to be a central flaw in its own conception of a parallel universe, everyone seems to question why both universes are identical when they must be billions of years old, without considering the branching theory. There is some interest in the characters and their support working out some for of twisted scientific method, but it does all get quite cosmic by the end. But by far the strangest thing in the book is its commitment to the word "wicked". The anomaly is described constantly as wicked, that it is acting in a wicked way, to so much of a degree that I wondered if it had some form of technical meaning that I was missing. It doesn't its just a weird tick in a book that does have an original idea in it, but doesn't do much original with it.