Why You'll Love This
A broke asteroid miner pokes the wrong rock and wakes up the next morning with a metal arm and an alien AI living in his skull.
- Great if you want: first-contact horror wrapped in hard sci-fi and class anxiety
- The experience: fast-moving and escalating — tension builds from page one
- The writing: Taylor blends sharp wit with genuine dread; the voice stays grounded
- Skip if: you want philosophical depth over plot-driven momentum
About This Book
When a desperate asteroid miner named Ivan Pritchard investigates what looks like a routine space rock, he triggers something that begins rewriting him from the inside out — his arm turning to living metal, an alien intelligence taking up residence in his mind. What unfolds is a first-contact story built not on wonder but on dread, where the threat isn't invasion from outside but transformation from within. The stakes are as personal as a man trying to hold onto his humanity and as vast as the survival of the species, and Taylor keeps both in sharp, uncomfortable tension throughout.
Taylor's great skill here is making the science feel tactile and the characters feel grounded even as the premise escalates into the genuinely strange. His prose is clean and propulsive, with the dry wit Bobiverse readers will recognize — humor that cuts through existential terror rather than deflecting it. The book moves fast without feeling rushed, and the moral questions it raises about autonomy, consciousness, and what we'd sacrifice to protect the people we love give the story a weight that lingers well past the final page.
