My criteria for originality may be more lenient than yours. I think it would be difficult to find sci-fi that isn't derivative of older ideas to an extent, and it's harder for more recent work to stand out, because basically everything's already been done. Managing to combine a dozen ideas from previous works into a coherent whole is far from uncreative. So I feel the author was original enough in his approach, even though I thought it was scientifically inept.