Whooh. Where do I begin?
How about at the end, or rather, after the end.
After it was all over, I got to thinking. See, the whole time we weren't sure what exactly Falcon was. But then, at the end, we discovered that he (yes, he. I was very attentive to this, and most of the time Falcon was referred to in third-person, except at the end, when it was he.) was just a very clever AI.
See, my train of thought went like this: At first I thought he was a cyborg, dead flesh replaced with cybernetic enhancements a-la Robocop. But that leaves a few details out. Remember, Robocop ate baby food to keep his organics running. As far as I could tell, his organics were his brain, facial flesh, and probably the lungs, heart and intestines required to supply those with nutrients and oxygen. But in our story, we only hear mentions of batteries. No organic power source. And then, at the end, the story begins anew at the same spot. So clearly he was programmed into a fully cybernetic device.
Therefore, I concluded that Falcon was the digital imprint of a human being. That is actually pretty clever, and solves the whole AI problem in a brilliant stroke. We don't need to program a super-smart computer capable of thinking for itself and reaching decisions and conclusions, we have human brain images.
But, and here is where it breaks down, why do we need a mostly dead person to begin with? It sounded like they reconstructed him like Robocop, but that clearly is not what happened. They seem to have discarded his organic body.
So, if the whole deal is just a person's mind in a robot, why do we need the mostly dead guy? Why not perfectly healthy, and awfully clever and well-trained people, who volunteer their minds for this with no danger to themselves? Just copy the mind onto a USB, plug into the robot turtle and go.
Then, there is the whole deal with the author trying to get us to feel all all-this-has-happened-before-and-will-happen-again. But that can't be true, because at the end Falcon was discovered, and self-destructed. Success of his mission depended on the element of surprise. Without it he would not be able to collect valuable data. But now the Tripods know that he was there, and the next mission will be a guaranteed failure.
So that trope broke.
On the other hand, the story was very engaging. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to it and was entirely caught up in it. The mystery of a hostile alien species whose technology is sufficiently different from ours to look like magic. The tension of the mission, and the fact that even though the story was told in first-person, there was no guarantee that the mission would succeed.
It was only after the fact that I began to realize that the plot was so full of holes that you could use it to scrub a space ship.