Thanks so much to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with this e-Arc! I have a planned review of this on my Instagram and will also review on Goodreads once I get to this read. This is one of my most anticipated reads of this year! Until then, I am giving a star rating as a placeholder on Netgalley. Stay tuned for my in depth review on all my social media platforms!

HIGHLIGHTS
~prepare to be confused
~but in the best way
~relatable!MC is way too relatable
~really not your typical mecha story
~just get ‘wtf Sunai?!’ tattooed, it’ll be faster

Sometimes, a book is a total mindfuck. And sometimes, that is very much okay.

*

What you need to understand is: I have no fucking clue what just happened. I mean, I do, kind of. Superficially.

But deep down, in my heart of hearts, I know the truth: I have no fucking clue what just happened.

And it is AWESOME.

Hope is not an act for which the universe is beholden to reward you.

The Archive Undying isn’t what I call an LSD book, where the speculative elements are wacky as fuck and everything seems so random and also there are a lot of colours. I could sit down and explain the world of this book to you just fine, and it would make sense. It’s perfectly coherent. It’s not even hard to believe in – I was never sure if this story is set in another world, or our world’s future, because I don’t have to stretch my suspension of disbelief very much to buy that this could be us in a few hundred years or so. Nor is there any issue with Candon’s prose; her writing is graceful and sharp, and when she puts words together they make sense! They have meaning! They convey information that you can process and comprehend!

And yet…when you finish reading this book, and put it down, I can very nearly guarantee you will have no idea what just happened.

Both their brains are riddled with scars earned by enduring the faithless whim of the universe, hopped up on their ill-advised impulse to survive.

But! But. This is important. The Archive Undying is not confusing because it’s bad. I think most readers have, at some point, run into that kind of book; one that is messy, stopping-and-starting, all over the place, like the author was on drugs while writing it.

The Archive Undying feels instead like a book where the author is in complete control, knows exactly what is going on, is deftly keeping all the balls in the air – but I’m the one on drugs.

After literal months of brainstorming, that is the best way I have come up with to describe the sensation to you, dear reader. Because the whole way through this book, the sense that it all fits together comes through loud and clear. I am unshakeably certain that Candon knows exactly how this world works down to the smallest detail; that she understands, absolutely, the dynamics and histories between the various factions, cities, AIs, rebel groups, et al; that you could throw any fanfic-esque scenario you like at her, and she wouldn’t hesitate a beat before being able to tell you how any one of her characters would react to it, how they would act within it. She knows her story and the world it’s set in and the characters running around in it inside-out-and-backwards.

But we don’t.

It’s not that we’re being shown a very narrow piece of Sunai’s world; we actually see, if not a geographically huge slice, certainly one that cuts across many different classes, power structures, and other anthropological strata. No, we’re given all the pieces we could possibly need to put the puzzle box together…except the character motivations.

I don’t mean that the characters are not motivated. They absolutely are. But Candon draws a veil between the reader and the inner workings of her cast; she’s blown up the bridge that connects us and them, and because we can’t see inside the minds of the characters it feels so much more like we’re observing real people in the real world doing real things. It allows for mystery on a scale that most books are not capable of, gives room for more twists and reveals than could be packed into a story where we know the characters’ minds. The cast of Archive Undying can – and very much do – take us by surprise in a way they simply couldn’t if we could see inside their heads the way we’re used to doing. We’re not blind, exactly – it’s not that we get none of our main character’s thoughts – we’ve just not been given the advantage we’ve taken for granted so long we didn’t realise it was an advantage until it was gone.

We’re left, instead, to know these characters by what they do rather than what they think; and there’s something pretty powerful in that. In the real world, it’s only by what you do that you can be known; it is only what you do that matters, in the end, not what you think or feel. And so choosing to tell a story this way feels deliberate, feels pointed, feels like Candon is making a point. Maybe it’s something about how we treat characters so very differently from real people, because we understand and sympathise with them in a way we don’t – and can’t – with real people; maybe it’s about how wildly our self-image can conflict with how other people see us, with what we look like to the world instead of what we look like in the mirror. (A mirror is not perfectly accurate, after all; it shows us inverted, and according to some sources, not at our true size.) Maybe it’s about how little motivations matter, when push comes to shove; it doesn’t matter why you do a thing, only what you do and what effect that has. If I say something that hurts someone, the fact that I didn’t mean to hurt them is irrelevant; it certainly doesn’t undo the hurt. If I give a million dollars to charity because I want to look like a good person, my selfish motivation has no bearing on the good that comes from the act. I’m not willing to say motivations are meaningless, but…

Maybe it’s about making us question what the reality of a person is, making us think about how we form our understanding of others, making us ask how we know anybody at all and how accurate can that knowing ever be.

Selfishness is the worthiest trait of living creatures, for it preserves and nurtures you. You, I think, could do with more of it.

There’s definitely a dissonance between what Sunai, our main character, thinks of himself, versus how he appears to others around him, and to us. Sunai thinks he’s a coward, but his actions speak very differently; he thinks he’s worthless, but the events of the book show us someone not just sympathetic but actively wonderful. And we have to depend on what he does, not what he thinks, not just because Candon hides most of his motivation from us but because most of what we see of Sunai comes to us from others. A big chunk of Archive Undying is the second-person narration of something-like-an-AI which gets inside Sunai early in the book, and talks to him. Its reflections on him are our clearest window into him – but how trustworthy is that view? Not just in the sense of, how well can an AI and flesh-and-blood mortal ever really know each other, comprehend each other, make sense to each other, but: can we trust this thing? Is it telling us the truth? Is it fucking with Sunai, or genuinely out to help him?

Sometimes you don’t get to go back to being who you were. Sometimes, the changes kill you.

The cumulative effect of all this? I think it’s very appropriate to have a quote from Tamsyn Muir on the cover, because her Locked Tomb series make for a good comparison here. No, Archive Undying is not about necromancers in space, or swords, or Very Sapphic Girls with a Very Complicated Dynamic. But the wtf-ery you get with Locked Tomb is the closest I can think of to that of Archive Undying.

Let me put it this way: if you found the Locked Tomb books annoyingly confusing? Archive Undying is probably not for you.

Alternatively, if you, like most of us, enjoyed the wtf-ery (not necessarily understood it all – I know I didn’t – but enjoyed it) of the Locked Tomb, then please hop aboard, because I think you’ll be quite at home here.

“We talked about you getting shanked, I know we did. This is shank-worthy behavior, Adi.

The blurb tells you about all that you can be told about this book without getting into spoilers, so I’m not going to talk about the story so much. There is one, and it isn’t so baroquely convoluted that you can’t follow it – I could explain it to you in maybe a mid-sized paragraph. Not so bad! But I think it would be better for each reader to uncover it on their own, so instead I want to give you a quick rundown on why you are likely to love this, to try (probably fruitlessly) to explain what this book feels like.

Because gods, it is so full of emotion. The Archive Undying drips emotion, bleeds it, and there is no way to turn these razor-sharp pages without your bleeding for them too. Expect your heart to be lacerated with Feels and stitched back together with impossible giggles; brace yourself to lose your breath, and to find it again when you gasp with awe; be ready for a book that will hurt you, and make you so, so glad that it did.

You mustn’t ever say ‘yes’ to a god, even a little one. That’s how they become what they are. They will hate your ‘no’, and will strive to refuse it, for a god is only a god when it is absolute. Your ‘no’ unmakes them. That is why you must resist, Sunai. If divinity relies on our obedience, we survive only when we defy it.

Sunai is a disaster!queer who is one parts flirting to three parts trauma but can totally handle himself (more or less) right up until someone expresses any kind of positive emotion towards him, at which point he dissolves into a mess – making him far too relatable to my entire social circle.

Sunai must, with great urgency, attend to absolutely anything except this tender regard.

And yet this is more than a little bit of a love story, which means Sunai has to deal with Feels, and you will want to shake him and be unable to resist laughing at him, and you should definitely be prepared to want to pet him, like the adorable chaos-child that he is. He makes terrible decisions – seems to always find the worst possible option and pick that one – but I defy you not to love and adore and adopt him, nonetheless.

Or maybe because of.

Sunai thinks: Why is Adi so stupid! And: Why does he make me so stupid?

Gods, I am simply not smart enough for this book; I cannot write a review that will really do it justice. The Archive Undying is a labyrinth of pearl and bone and ceramic, smooth and elegant, and full of secrets and monsters, and I need to read it again, and again, and probably at least half a dozen times more after that, to really get it all. There are layers and layers here, in an intricate and kind of terrifying world, with a cast of sharp-edged misfits all walking around like their hearts are grenades with the rings pulled out. This is a book about personhood, and consent, and making stupid decisions because of your feelings; it’s about cooking and AI-gods and how much we value other people’s free will; it is sneaky and hilarious and beautiful and awe-full, a book that confuses you and demands you think.

Veyadi gives him a look of Don’t fucking patronize me, you goddamn clown man

The Archive Undying is a book you have to work at, not an easy read at all, but I have rarely come across one that was so hard but so worth it. I know this is going to be an incredibly polarising book – some readers are going to hate it, and honestly, I pity them. Because they are missing out on a wildly extravagant, astonishingly idiosyncratic, genre-redefining gem, and that is always something to be mourned.

Now their consent is asked for, because at last it is required.

This strange, gorgeous, sci-fi fever dream is out this coming Tuesday. I adore it, and I hope you will too.

I remain, days after finishing the audiobook of this, mindblown over Emma Mieko Candon's vision. Grand doesn't begin to describe the scope of the world she's imagined, with battles fought both at the micro and macro level and a sense of wonder that permeates the entire book. And, of course, the line-level work on display left me breathless on multiple occasions. I love how Emma Mieko Candon puts words together.

This book is not for those who want an easy escape. There's nothing in this book that's easy, from Sunai, the main character, to the plot, to the worldbuilding. Personally, I enjoy worldbuilding where things are not completely spelled out and I have to work to understand the background, but I also see how needing to use a lot of inference would lose readers. But again, I like books that make me work a little, and THE ARCHIVE UNDYING is exactly that: cerebral, tough, chewy, labyrinthine in the best way, with a dash of laugh-out-loud humor in the most unexpected places.

I agree with the other reviewers that this is a tough book to describe. But it's perfect for those who want to be shown a new world, to be thrown into a new place and left, much like Sunai and Veyadi, to figure things out one painful revelation at a time. If you love mecha stories that are meditations on the body and the self and how those relate to society as a whole; if you love science fiction with a strong literary bent; if you love a complicated (understatement) relationship between the love interests; if you love queernorm societies with fascinating worldbuilding; THE ARCHIVE UNDYING might just be for you.

I was already a fan of Emma's first novel, Star Wars Visions: Ronin, so I went into this novel knowing I'd like it. I did not know how much I'd LOVE it. As a fan of adult scifi like Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice/Imperial Radch books, I was already interested in the topic of worlds with AI with multiple human bodies. And while those books delve into the political aspects that a society with ancillaries brings, The Archive Undying asks what it is like when the bodies connected to the AI, in this case called relics, are more a question of faith and spirituality. What does it mean, to love a god who has also taken your bodily autonomy? How does that inform your choices?

This book has a little something for everyone. The main character, Sunai, is loveable in the way that he so desperately does not want to be loveable and says it constantly, but you, the reader, much like his god Iterate Fractal, and everyone who meets him, cannot but help to love him. The worldbuilding, like the tendrils of Iterate Fractal into a relic's brain, takes some time to understand, and get used to, but you slowly begin to piece it together just as Sunai allows himself to realize certain truths.

And the prose? I LOVE Emma's style, so I may be biased, but in almost every chapter there is a line that just knocked me flat. It feels like reading epic poetry, but at the same time modern, relateable and hypercharacterized. Even some of the most mundane occurences are described in ways that are beautiful, which I think pairs so well with the theme of making the machine the divine. I read it as an audiobook, my preferred method, and I'm actually sad I did, despite it being a really good audiobook, because I wanted to catch all these lines and highlight them as they happened, which almost never happens for me. One such example:

“He wants to see that face as he’s seen in turn. What a fulsome whole they make together. He is consumed by the transcendence of union.”

One thing to note, is that this is adult scifi, and not a scifi capital R Romance novel, but there is a romance at the center of it, and it is BREATHTAKING. I think of them constantly. Yes, they are gay. So are most of the people around them. But they are also deeply flawed people rejecting connection despite wanting it dearly and the constant yearning is DELICIOUS. Fellas, is it gay to both worship and fear the same AI god together?

(Speaking on representation, yes, there's significant LGBTQ representation, but also very prominent characters are very explicitly neurodivergent, some might argue autistic, and several are physically disabled, and it's treated extremely well and normally. It feels very natural, and even factors into the world and character building for one character at one point.)

Like the AI god Iterate Fractal itself, this book left me hungry for more, of Sunai, and of this world. I immediately would pay any amount of money to see this as an adult animated series, maybe in the visual storytelling style of Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It's a story about mechas and AI tech, but deeply rooted in the natural world, and the people of a city. It has huge and brutal action scenes, but the general vibe is quiet, and rooted in how the machine attempts to be a part of the natural world, from how it acts like vines, to how it uses bone and coral. I am almost upset I read this book as it is coming out, because then I cannot binge all the books in the upcoming series at once and have it piped into my brain directly as if I was a relic interfacing with an AI god myself.

What a ride!! This is definitely a book you need to pay close attention to! And it's confusing even when you do at times! This was definitely an experimental writing I can't really compare to anything else. I think the payoff is there for someone acquainted with the genre. Thank you so much to Tor Publishing Group for the ARC of this one!

This was brilliant and yet completely frustrating. The writing is beautiful, the world is immersive, and the characters are fascinating. And yet, I had a really hard time connecting.

I feel like this is a story that some will love and others, not so much. I loved this in the sense that I want to continue the series so I can see where this goes and follow this author.

It's a post-apocalyptic world that AI gods used to rule. The main character has a way to still somewhat communicate. This story is written almost lyrically at times, with strong emotions that seem to spill off the pages.

Overall, I would recommend giving this a shot. I'm really glad I got to read this!

Out June 27, 2023!

Thank you, Netgalley and Publisher, for this Arc!

I really wanted to like this one, but after a point I was just skimming to get to the end. This was due to a mix of seemingly purposefully obtuse world-building and a meandering, cyclical plot that wasn't really explained by the stated motives of the characters. I really loved all of the characters -- they were by far the best part of this.

3.5, honestly. The story in this is genuinely amazing. It's just a little tricky to follow. Sunai is an unreliable narrator, who is sometimes hallucinating, sometimes remembering, and sometimes being addressed in the second person by the voices trapped in his head. If you can wrap your head around the narration, this is definitely worth your time. It's just going to take effort. Give yourself time, let it unfold slowly, and enjoy the ride.

I’m going to need Tor to massively upgrade the marketing budget for this book because holy hell this is the weird queer SFF book of my dreams. Get in the fucking robot indeed.

At the heart of The Archive Undying, past the robots and AI and exquisitely described body horror, are the characters. Our main character, Sunai, the peak Pathetic Man^TM who’s ever decision makes the reader scream ‘WHY”. His one-night-stand turned boss, Veyadi, man with an ounce more self-preservation than his companions. And all the various voices-in-heads with a penchant for 2nd-person narration and goals of dubious motivations. Surprisingly character driven for a Giant Robot Book^TM, the layers of characterization the main cast gets, peeling back layer after layer of history and trauma, and their dialogues of hidden intent and double meanings truly drive the heart of this book. Candon’s characters are A Mess and accompanying them on this story was a delight.

Accompanying these characters is some of the most spectacular prose I’ve read in a while. Candon really makes the reader work for each sentence, but my god is the writing beautiful. It’s clear this is one of those books where every word is deliberately chosen to have the most devastating effect on the reader. The religious ferocity in Sunai’s every description of Iterate Fractal, the everyday horrors of this bizarre semi-post-apocalyptic world, and the fun body-horror bits of ‘holy shit those people are just being stabbed with coral huh’, all rendered in incredible detail that immerses the reader right in. Tor’s been on a roll lately with the weird queer novels that have stellar prose and stories that really make you think.

Naturally, this is a world that makes the reader work for comprehension. We start the book thrown in the middle of the story, and the reader is expected to make their own connections along the way. I found myself often going ???, in part from the sheer weirdness of the setting, but I was always able to figure things out, eventually. Certainly this is a fantastic book for re-reading over and over again, going over every minor detail with a fine comb. Plot-wise, it’s hard to give a description beyond ‘man fails to run away from his past and face the consequences, while his head is starting to get a little crowded with all those voices’.

Overall, I rate this book a 5/5. A queer giant robot book with stellar character development, beautiful prose that’ll make you think, and a bizarre semi-post-apocalyptic world. I absolutely cannot wait for the sequel.

DNF. This story was really hard to follow, especially with the omniscient POV. I also had a difficult time picturing the universe/surroundings. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, which is normal for the first quarter of SFF books, but still, nothing was clicking for me at all. I really wanted to like this book, the synopsis was so fascinating (and the cover is so cool !! would've loved to have that on my bookshelf). ty tordotcom for the e-arc!

The Archive Undying is an incredibly unique book that was entirely unexpected. This ended up being something that was really unpredictable and not at all what I expected, but I still really appreciated what Emma Mieko Candon attempted to do with this story. I think my biggest problem with this book, however, was that I really struggled to immerse myself in the world and setting, and I felt fairly lost for a majority of the book in ways that didn't lend to a pleasant reading experience. I also appreciated that the author seemed to put a lot of effort into the characters as well and made this more of a character-driven story, which I tend to enjoy, but I didn't end up connecting with any of them as much as I'd like to have. All that being said, if you want to try out something a little experimental sci-fi/fantasy-esque, then you should absolutely check this one out. If you want things a little simpler and less going on, maybe not. I'm definitely glad I read it and will look for more from this author in the future!

Thank you NetGalley and Tor for an ARC of this book for an honest review.

I was really looking forward to this book, the premise is great and unique but there are flaws. There is a big lack of world building, the pacing is confusing, and the characters dont have their own unique voices.

Overall this leads to being very confused and not caring about the story. I thought it was just me, but I see a lot of other reviews that say the same thing. I almost DNF'd this one, but its going to be a series and I might want to pick up book #2 if the author/editor/publisher sees these reviews for Book 1 and fixes them for book 2.

There is a wonderful world, characters and concept here and I want to be able to understand it and explore it further.

I'm intrigued by the characters and the setting of this book, but the worldbuilding was so purposely opaque that 40% in I couldn't tell you how the world functioned or really even what was happening and why these people were doing what they were doing.

While I had really high hopes for this novel and was so excited to receive an ARC, the at-arms-length characters and too-confusing plot left me less than satisfied with The Archive Undying.

There were some great things about it. Some scenes do crackle with excitement - mainly the action scenes. The concept is also very cool - a sort of cyberpunk fantasy with a fun blend of tech and mysticism. I enjoyed the multi-POV, especially the unhinged AIs as unreliable or chaotic narrators.

Unfortunately, this novel is absolutely confusing but not in a good way. I generally enjoy a complex whirlwind of a story where I feel like I’m missing something but it all comes together in the end. This book is not a puzzle you're slowly putting together, as you’re aware of what the book is doing the whole time; it’s just hard to follow its trajectory. I think the book will really work for some people, but I just found myself ambivalent toward it after about 30%, and had to push myself to pick it up every night.

This could be because I found the novel very passive in terms of how it was written. The characters were held at arms-length because we’re told a lot of what they are like but not exactly shown. It’s frustrating because I enjoyed the serious nerd + law-breaker romance dynamic, a kind of wizard + rogue if we think about it in terms of fantasy. I enjoyed the way their love story began, where both refused to admit they were more romantically attached than just the occasional hookup, but eventually, there was so much “we shouldn’t date” nonsense - it felt like an unnecessary struggle that took up a lot of space.

The other thing that really held me back from enjoying the novel fully was that it seemed like no one could really die, at least the main characters. As such, there is a considerable lack of tension. It’s very hard to make the stakes high enough for an unkillable character, and this one didn’t pull it off.

Again, I think a niche group of readers will love it, but it wasn't for me.

Thank you to Tor for the ARC of this book I received in May.

This book was heavy - at least to me - and one of the reasons why it receives the rating it does. Because while this book is a great read, the fact that it took me so long to get through it when it normally doesn’t take me this long to read a book this size, really frustrated me.

The learning curve isn’t steep, it’s probably easier if you read a lot of sci-fi with a similar type of world building, but it certainly took me some time to get an understanding of what was what. The author does a really good job of gradually fleshing their world building out, revealing the relationships between things/terms and what that means to the overall world and Sunai in particular.

The prose is excellent, and sometimes poetic. The balance Candon has to maintain between technological mumbo-jumbo, a dysfunctional universe, and an incredibly dysfunctional main character who refuses to acknowledge what’s right in front of him until someone else forces him to - and to make me still enjoy reading, really worked for me.

I wouldn't necessarily say I loved any of the characters, as they're all dysfunctional in ways that are brought to the forefront, but they are likable, diverse, and interesting. They are characters I want to read about in future books.

Definitely something for anyone to consider reading, especially if you like your books to have blends of other genres mixed in.

Fascinating world building! I think that this would appeal to a wide variety of college students in our speculative fiction course, but overall I did not finish it after 50% due to becoming a bit discouraged by the slow pace.

However, I do think it's a worthy novel for anyone interested in reading this type of fiction. I highly recommend it for all public libraries or literary science fiction courses at the University or college level.

*Thank you NetGalley for the advance reader digital copy of this book

This book has such an interesting concept. It is rich with intricate details. The world is unique and Candon has a beautiful way of immersing the reader into it. I loved the concept, the cover art, and the description. However I do feel that this novel could have been better. I am giving it 3 stars because I enjoyed the characters and towards the end of the novel I began to make connections. Much of the narrative was difficult to follow, shifting points of view without any forewarning. I had to re-read several chapters so that I might begin to understand what was happening. I would certainly recommend this book however it could certainly be frustrating for some readers, I know I was quite confused throughout a good chunk of the book. The reader is expected to understand the mechanisms and the world without having been introduced to it or given any contextual information. The interfacing was certainly a huge confusion point for me when it was first introduced. I still don't exactly know what I read but I couldn't put it down.

#thearchiveundying #NetGalley

I’m only rating this here because you have to put a star rating. This was a DNF for me and I normally don’t put a star rating on books I don’t finish. I admit that I did not get very far in this book so I don’t have a lot to say on it. The premise was so interesting but I had not one single clue what was happening and I struggled so much to understand the start of this story and it just wasn’t fun enough for me to want to push through.

Genre: science fiction

It’s Sunai’s lot in life to keep dying. You could say he’s even used to it by now. He’s a “walking, talking artifact of corruption,” a relic AI fused with a human body, trying to f*ck his way through life figuring out what he’s doing here.

The Archive Undying is going to be hard to describe. If you read the blurb and expect a book of action, you may be left wanting. Yes, it’s about the things you can put into the summary: corrupt AIs and giant fighting robots, but that’s just surface level plot. It’s speculative, a book of ideas, with lush writing and stunning prose that makes you stop and think. It’s about death and dying, but also about rebirth.

The worldbuilding is descriptive and yet also feels intentionally sparse, because the world itself is a matter of perception: is it even real? Do we have a solid enough grasp on the concept of reality?

If you enjoy contemplative ideas driven science fiction like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or even Ursula K Le Guin, I recommend checking out Archive Undying. There isn’t a strong narrative plot arc, but sometimes you just need character- and idea-driven stories about AIs and mechs.

The audiobook, narrated by Yung-I Chang, was wonderful to listen to, as I always appreciate the audio boost for a slower, more contemplative story.

Thank you for to NetGalley and @tordotcompub for the eARC and MacMillan Audio for the ALC. The Archive Undying is available 6/27/23.

I was initially really excited to read this book. The blurb does a good job of capturing the intrigue and unique world building; however, I did not find myself rooting for the main character. From the beginning, Sunai is snarky, arrogant, and vulgar--and I don't really see much of an arc from him. Also, while I see the drama and flare of the writing style, there are moments where I think it came off too pretentious and too raunchy--especially when we first meet Sunai. I appreciate the dynamic, fraught queer romance, cinematic scenes, and the overall pacing and structure of the novel, but I just couldn't find it in me to root for Sunai which ultimately made me not enjoy the book.