Many of the premises of this novel are common to several science fiction books: a future world in which the gap between rich and poor is very wide, a fairly recent past of war and disease, and a violently sovereign and populist politics. Indeed, read in 2021, a book written in 2016 about a pandemic and an Earth First movement gives one the creeps. That said, underlying the novel is a complicated family feud, the mechanisms of which are quite well described. The alien vehicle approaching Earth is the obvious trigger for a series of conflicts simmering beneath an apparently calm, if not benign, surface and, after a brief moment of reckoning, the happy ending is fairly predictable.