The timeless driver of grief resolution is frissoned by the SF setting into the ethical issues of recreating a lost loved one by AI and cybernetics. There are twists to SF commonplaces: the aliens have departed leaving humanity no wiser as to why mass genocide and exile to barely habitable planets was inflicted on them. Life on Magenta has quite a Wild West feel, the baddies are very Bondish, and it's risky to use a Potterian invisibility cloak.