This reminded me of two other books I enjoyed immensely more: We are Legion (We are Bob), specifically the Deltan Camp/Archimedes storyline, and Olan Thorensen's Destiny's Crucible series, specifically the first book in the series.

In both cases, those books deal with how a visitor to primitive cultures can carefully and wisely introduce new technology. There's very little of this in this book, though the main premise is the same.

After binging a bunch of the excellent Middle Falls series by the same author, this was a huge disappointment. I struggled to make it to the end of the book, ramping up the speed higher than normal just to trudge through it.

The narrator is fine, except for the "native" language and names, as well as very little difference between narration and each character's speech patterns. The native names are too similar and eventually I realized it just didn't matter who was doing things or saying things...the narrator would have had to work really hard to make this work, and I don't think he was up to it.