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Monthly Archives: June 2023

The Archive Undying: A Review

If you ask my coworkers what my most anticipated book of the summer is, odds are very good that they would mention Emma Mieko Candon’s The Archive Undying. The Star Wars: The Ronin author hooked me with the cover art alone, and the premise of the book intrigued me. A silly reference to Neon Genesis Evangelion in the description just ensured that I would pursue the book as publication approached.

Sunai doesn’t want to do a lot of things. He’s good at cooking, but bad at making rational decisions, especially when it comes to his taste in men. He’s good at identifying artificial intelligences, especially the older ones, but he’s reluctant to reveal why. He’s good at running from his past, but bad at staying unnoticed by the people who want to find him.

His world is full of robots. Massive artificial intelligences, beings that were practically gods, ruled over the city-states, each claiming territory and protecting the humans who lived there. While they all had different ways of doing things, almost all of them eventually went insane and became corrupted. The people who served as priests (and most residents still in the area) would be killed as the AI purged everything around it. The same thing happened in the city-state of Khuon Mo seventeen years ago, when Iterate Fractal lost stability, but on that day something unexpected happened. Sunai, serving as an archivist-priest for Iterate Fractal, died, but was brought back to life.

Now, Sunai can’t die. Or at least, he can’t stay dead. Injuries that he receives heal fast, and even being killed again will really only inconvenience him for a little while. He’s spent most of the last seventeen years trying to find out why Iterate Fractal sought to save him, and running away from the people he needs most so that he doesn’t hurt them. Plying his knowledge of AI, he’s made a living as a roaming salvage hunter so that he can stay one step (or more) ahead of the Harbor.

The Harbor run much of the world now, scavenging pieces of corrupted AI gods to create their own combat mechs. They want to control even more, but they need relics to do so. Relics like Sunai. After a drunken one-night-stand leads him to the knowledge that the Harbor have managed to make a mech out of remnants of Iterate Fractal, he feels compelled to find a way to stop them, but he’s going to have to face his past in order to get there. And Iterate Fractal is waiting, and hungry.

Y’all, this book is baffling, but I love it. Sunai is a complete disaster of a person. Emma Mieko Candon has crafted a dizzying (honestly at times overwhelming) world. There’s a lot to take in over the course of The Archive Undying, and it can be a trick to keep track of who and what are where, never mind the fact that Sunai isn’t particularly reliable as a narrator. However, I believe that it’s an engaging work with some narrative tricks that remind me of Harrow the Ninth. I feel like I’m not going to have gotten everything I can out of The Archive Undying in a single read-through, and I’m grateful for a text that challenged my expectations of what a sci-fi novel can be.

My utmost thanks to Tor and NetGalley for providing me with an eARC in exchange for a fair review, and thanks to Tor for taking a chance on a book this bold. I sincerely hope to see more of Sunai’s world, because a story this unique deserves to continue to be told.

It’s out in the world as of Tuesday, 6/27/23. Get in the robot.

The Surviving Sky: A Review

Earth has been uninhabitable for hundreds of years due to the earthrages, massive earthquake-storm hybrids that literally reshape the face of the planet. Luckily for humanity, individuals known as architects learned how to traject, manipulating plants to do their will. Before the earthrages wiped the surface clean, cities made of plants were guided into the air, and the architects expended their energy to keep them aloft until the storms passed. Now all of mankind that remains lives in these ashrams, where the architects can guide the lives of everyone aboard, only landing during lulls in the storms so that the architects can rest.

Not all citizens are architects, however, and no one is more upset about that than Ahilya. She’s an archaeologist, and the only one in Nakshar. She has studied the surface in between rages, and staunchly believes that there might be something out there that is surviving through the storms somehow. But to gather the proof that she needs, she’ll need an architect’s assistance and approval from Nakshar’s council to even leave the ashram the next time it lands. Complicating things for her is her husband Iravan. He’s not just an architect, but a senior architect, and a member of the council. After a fight they had a few months ago, he’s not so sure that her research expedition is necessary. Is he just trying to keep her safe, or is he trying to maintain the status quo and help the architects keep their stranglehold on power?

When Iravan decides at the last minute to replace the junior architect who had been assigned to accompany Ahilya and her young assistant, all of the plans for the expedition are thrown into disarray. Both of them are hiding secrets from the other, and trajecting is getting more and more difficult. What they find in the jungle could change everything about their world and their marriage, if it doesn’t kill them both first.

The Surviving Sky is a tense, brilliant piece of sci-fi/fantasy. Kritika Rao has built (or maybe trajected) a phenomenal new world hovering just above danger at all times. The characters are well-rounded, and the tension between Ahilya and her husband is palpable. Class warfare is interwoven throughout, with the long-running conflict between architects and non-architects showing beautifully in the strain on Ahilya and Iravan’s marriage. It’s available as of yesterday, and I highly recommend you check it out at your earliest convenience. My utmost thanks to Titan Books and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for a fair review.