This is diverting enough in its way, but I can’t help but feel its major achievement is one of marketing: how did a book that’s essentially an undistinguished sci-fi novel manage somehow to acquire a reputation as daringly innovative in structure, writing and ideas?

Like a number of contemporary fiction novels (Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake being the most obvious), it’s an irritating example of the literary establishment’s enthusiasm for genre fiction, just so long as it self-identifies as something “worthier”.