The cortical modems are pretty cool and you've clearly done your homework here. Great name too. Nice.
I think there are too many adjectives, and superfluous bundles of adjectives ("strange exotic castle"). A lot of the description also feels generic, especially for how interesting the setting is.
Nobody seems to smell or taste anything, even when eating we just get texture. If this is deliberate due to radiation poisoning, that's cool, I like it, maybe make it clearer tho?
I'm not feeling the opening, it's slow, I don't like the opening paragraph. It doesn't feel like there is any conflict or tension. The main character opens by telling me he's basically a walking corpse. No chance of survival. None of the characters care about what they're doing. So I feel like the stakes could not be lower, and it's hard for me to care about the action on the page. This doesn't seem to change.
I felt there was potential for a much more engaging opening, though, with the reactor explosion or a fakeout with the cortical modems + first person perspective.
I also think the opening jumps into dense exposition about the mission background way too quickly, before I had any reason to care about these characters or why they are there.
I don't find any of the main characters interesting or likable. Watts' characters are not likable either, but they are all interesting.
Things just seem to happen to the protagonist. I didn't feel like he had any agency.
I think the flashbacks and shift to omniscient third should be avoided if not necessary. I think you can find ways around chopping up the structure like this. For example, you already have literal head-hopping tech in the modems.
And on exposition -
First decide who you are writing for. Greg Egan writes for quite a different audience compared to Watts. If you are going for a niche audience like Egan then you're going to need to find beta readers who are part of that audience.
If you are writing for a more general audience like Watts then I don't like a lot of this exposition. If you study the way Watts provides info, it is relevant to the narrative, and expressed in a way that allows a non-expert to understand it. This is part of the skill of this type of science fiction writing, taking some obscure speculative science concept and presenting it in a way that is comprehensible and evocative, such that it is a crucial part of the story and the audience is actually interested in how it works for that reason.
A couple of examples - I don't understand why you tell us the orbital parameters of planet nine when introducing it. Even if the semi-major axis is somehow crucial to the story later on, readers are not going to remember that. Also, being more evocative with the detail that you do provide - "semi-major axis of 545 AU" vs, for example, "the Sun hung as one pinprick amongst thousands; Planet Nine was brushing the apex of its orbit, over five hundred times further from its parent than Earth." Sometimes I felt like I was reading an excerpt from a scientific paper, not prose.
Second example, the cortical modems, which are cool, but when you introduce them we get a bunch of jargon about how they work before you actually show us their effects in prose. In my opinion this should always be the other way around. Show us what it does, and then the audience thinks, oh, this is cool, I wonder how it works, then you can bust out the exposition (woven into the narrative in a comprehensible and evocative way, of course, rather than all dumped at once).
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some general comments:
And on exposition - First decide who you are writing for. Greg Egan writes for quite a different audience compared to Watts. If you are going for a niche audience like Egan then you're going to need to find beta readers who are part of that audience.
If you are writing for a more general audience like Watts then I don't like a lot of this exposition. If you study the way Watts provides info, it is relevant to the narrative, and expressed in a way that allows a non-expert to understand it. This is part of the skill of this type of science fiction writing, taking some obscure speculative science concept and presenting it in a way that is comprehensible and evocative, such that it is a crucial part of the story and the audience is actually interested in how it works for that reason.
A couple of examples - I don't understand why you tell us the orbital parameters of planet nine when introducing it. Even if the semi-major axis is somehow crucial to the story later on, readers are not going to remember that. Also, being more evocative with the detail that you do provide - "semi-major axis of 545 AU" vs, for example, "the Sun hung as one pinprick amongst thousands; Planet Nine was brushing the apex of its orbit, over five hundred times further from its parent than Earth." Sometimes I felt like I was reading an excerpt from a scientific paper, not prose.
Second example, the cortical modems, which are cool, but when you introduce them we get a bunch of jargon about how they work before you actually show us their effects in prose. In my opinion this should always be the other way around. Show us what it does, and then the audience thinks, oh, this is cool, I wonder how it works, then you can bust out the exposition (woven into the narrative in a comprehensible and evocative way, of course, rather than all dumped at once).
All just my two cents of course.
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