Undying10/6/2023 ![]() It's hard to care about a character when you know they can't die, and even harder to care if someone's a murderer if the person they "killed" isn't dead. And, without spoilers, I want to say it is tricky to play with multiple resurrections during a story. I love a character-driven story, and this feels like a character-driven story, but I could not attach to any of the characters. Unfortunately, it was just out of my grasp.)Ībout the characters. I hope you do better, because I loved this world. (That might be a failure of my imagination. But what it means practically is that as rich as the world is, I could not envision it. There are too many shifting POVs, too many voices, too many common words repurposed to different inworld meanings but not defined, and simply not enough grounding either in place or character. All very cool concepts, and as a former programmer with a thing for Cronenberg-esque body/machine horror, I was in.īut the execution of the story is impossible to follow. And our protagonist, who is a former AI devotee called a relic (I thought of him like a monk, but maybe it's more like a state of being than a job title) who can still interface with the dead AI(s) which is a big no-no in this world. A post-apocalyptic future where the apocalypse was caused by a pantheon of AI run amok who apparently self-imploded? The world is now ruled by a shady government whose aim is to.I'm not sure what. Second, the world feels unique, or at least I've never seen a world like this. So many lovely turns of phrase, especially around character reactions and emotion. The prose in this novel is at times so beautiful I had to stop and admire her craft. I enjoyed Candon's Star Wars novel and she is clearly a talented writer. I would call this experimental science fiction with a post-apocalyptic godpunk vibe (but make the gods AI.) Add a dose of body horror, a sprinkle of mycelium dust, and fill the rest with a whole lot of confusion. Ok, so this is going to be a very difficult book to review. The Archive Undying is the first volume of Emma Mieko Candon's Downworld Sequence, a sci-fi series where AI deities and brutal police states clash, wielding giant robots steered by pilot-priests with corrupted bodies. But when Sunai wakes up in the bed of the one man he never should have slept with, he finds himself on a path straight back into the world of gods and machines. He's run as far as he can from the wreckage of his faith, drowning himself in drink, drugs, and men. For the seventeen years since, Sunai has walked the land like a ghost, unable to die, unable to age, and unable to forget the horrors he's seen. But in its final death throes, the god brought one thing back to its favorite child, Sunai. ![]() It killed its priests, its city, and all its wondrous works. When the robotic god of Khuon Mo went mad, it destroyed everything it touched. WHEN THAT CORPSE RUNS OFF, ONLY DEVOTION CAN BRING IT BACK WHEN A CITY FALLS, IT LEAVES A CORPSE BEHIND We also share information about your use of our website with our social media, advertising and analytics partners.War machines and AI gods run amok in The Archive Undying, national bestseller Emma Mieko Candon's bold entry into the world of mecha fiction. We use cookies to personalize content and ads, provide social media features, and analyze the use of our website. This helps us measure the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns. Microsoft Advertising uses these cookies to anonymously identify user sessions. It also serves behaviorally targeted ads on other websites, similar to most specialized online marketing companies. The Facebook cookie is used by it's parent company Meta to monitor behavior on this website in order to serve targeted ads to its users when they are logged into its services. Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of the website, compiling reports on website activity for us and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage. The purpose of Google Analytics is to analyze the traffic on our website. Security (protection against CSRF Cross-Site Request Forgery) ![]() Stores login sessions (so that the server knows that this browser is logged into a user account) which cookies were accepted and rejected). Storage of the selection in the cookie banner (i.e. being associated with traffic metrics and page response times. Random ID which serves to improve our technical services by i.e. Server load balancing, geographical distribution and redundancy
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