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Tag Archives: AI

Unexploded Remnants: A Review

Alice is the last surviving human in the universe, and she’s on the run. When she was exploring the Alta Sidoie market, she found something in a scrap collector’s booth that was far more than met the eye. Unfortunately for her, she wasn’t the only one who recognized it. Now she’s being chased throughout an intergalactic portal network by a warmongering alien race that wants to use the weapon-controlling AI she found to attack anyone who has ever wronged them.

Alice fell into the portal network by chance, an accidental bit of access from a world that wasn’t supposed to be able to connect. She was observed by the Archive, one of the unifying forces for good in the universe, and sent back to report on humanity as a whole. Eventually Earth’s conflicts grew to the point where the Archive opted to quarantine the world instead of attempting to keep helping, leaving humans to their own slow self-destruction. Alice, however, was allowed to keep performing work for them. Now alongside her virtual assistant, Bugs, she’s employed as a blend of archaeologist and grave robber for the Archive, trading in favors and information as well as artifacts.

Alice has her hands on the key to one of the most powerful remaining weapons in the galaxy, and the enemy is closing in. The AI is a threat to everyone, but Alice is determined to save Gunn, the being trapped in the heart of the artifact. She doesn’t know who she can fully trust, but she’s going to do whatever it takes to free him.

Elaine Gallagher has packed a tremendous amount of detail into a very small package with Unexploded Remnants. This novella is fast-paced and a hell of a lot of fun. World hopping action and clever characters reminiscent of Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, and Evelyn O’Connor make for a quick, entertaining read that still manages to provide commentary on weapons of war and how we treat soldiers.

My utmost thanks to Tor and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for a fair review. Unexploded Remnants is out today, 6/25/24. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

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.