A space adventure set on a lone ship where the clones 
of a murdered crew just find their murderer 
-- 
before they kill again.

The setup of a 400 year journey through space were six clones are maintaining the ship and cargo are brutally murdered was really appealing to me. I thought  that the mixture of space/sci-fi and murder/mystery is really nice.

So what do i like about the book. Well first of all it was a enjoy full read without any quirks the way the story is narrated. The details especially the tech that is present, like food printers and cloning but also the politics related to cloning are well presented and explained. I liked it in general how Mur Lafferty integrates it into the main story line. Most of the time she accomplishes to keep the read interesting.

how to do it?

This is the full script that the test.las file to visualize it with mathplotlib.

import numpy as np
import laspy
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

input_las = laspy.file.File("test.las", mode="r")
point_records = input_las.points.copy()

lasScaleX = input_las.header.scale[0]
lasOffsetX = input_las.header.offset[0]
lasScaleY = input_las.header.scale[1]
lasOffsetY = input_las.header.offset[1]
lasScaleZ = input_las.header.scale[2]
lasOffsetZ = input_las.header.offset[2]

p_X = np.array((point_records['point']['X'] * lasScaleX) + lasOffsetX)
p_Y = np.array((point_records['point']['Y'] * lasScaleY) + lasOffsetY)
p_Z = np.array((point_records['point']['Z'] * lasScaleZ) + lasOffsetZ)

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111, projection='3d')
ax.scatter(p_X, p_Y, p_Z, c='r', marker='o')
plt.show()

LAS and laspy specfic code

input_las = laspy.file.File("test.las", mode="r")
point_records = input_las.points.copy()

The first function opens the test.las file in read only mode. With the second function all points with there attributes are conveniently copied to an array. This way we can access all X,Y and Z values at once.