The takeaway I got from this is that girls rule and boys drool? Really, it's that mature, for all of the time spent on exposition set up and cool ideas. Wright has some other really great offerings out there, so go find one of those. It isn't a fast read, and it's really unsatisfying. If you are debating spending money and time on this book, please do not. Nearly two centuries later, his sanity restored, Montrose is awakened from cryo-suspension with no memory of his posthuman actions, to find Earth transformed in strange and disturbing ways, and learns that the Monument still carries a secret he must decode-one that will define humanity’s true future in the universe. So Montrose does the unthinkable: he injects himself with a dangerous biochemical drug designed to boost his already formidable intellect to superhuman intelligence.

Known as the Monument, the artifact is inscribed with data so complex, only a posthuman mind can decipher it. The chance to help usher in that future comes when Montrose is recruited for a manned interstellar mission to investigate an artifact of alien origin. But Montrose is also a mathematical genius-and a romantic who dreams of a future in which humanity rises from the ashes to take its place among the stars. Hundreds of years in the future, after the collapse of the Western world, young Menelaus Illation Montrose grows up in what was once Texas as a gunslinging duelist for hire.

Count to a trillion by john c wright