I was really disappointed with this book because the cover and the book description were so interesting. But I was totally confused on what was going on in the book. It seems like the author skipped a majority of the world building and expected the audience to kind of guess what was going on. Within the first chapter I was totally confused because it felt like the author started chapter 1 in the middle of the story with no context and just kept on going.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Tor Publishing for an advanced copy of this science fiction novel that is big, brash and bold with a look at a future that is filled with ideas that I don't think I have ever read before.

Science fiction books in the seventies, well late sixties into seventies were filled with odd ideas and crazier plots. Call it a new generation, new influences, new drugs. Some of this craziness cooled down with Star Wars casting a shadow like a star destroyer over the market. There was cyberpunk, but that was its on niche, and really there were only a few writers that really made the movement, many just said ok computers and words like yakuza and technosickness and books were written. Recently though the ideas have gotten bigger, the inclusiveness larger, and the books that are appearing are not only challenging, but out there. Emma Meiko Candon in The Archive Undying, book one in The Downworld Sequence has written a book that looks at a future that is new and very different, though it has many of the same problems we have today, only with giant mechas who were treated as Gods.

The future is a mess. Giant mechanical robots, who are worshipped like gods once ruled the earth, each with priests, temples and worshipers. Until the day Khoun Mo went crazy? suicidal? homicidal? and destroyed everything around itself, anyone who understood the AI that ran things, and those who were keeping the peace. Only Sunni who was once dead has been brought back in the last seconds, doomed to limp the Earth never aging, never healing, stuck in a state or permanence, one that fades with either drink or bad relationships. A letter sends Sunni on a bender and he awakens on a mech in the wasteland looking for a temple that makes everyone forget that it is there. Hired to find the mech, as Sunni is immune to the forgetting Sunni gets the crew inside the temple where something goes wrong or right, and things begin to change.

This book has a lot of great ideas and some beautiful writing, however this is a book that one has to invest a lot of time in. This is not a beach read. There are no info dumps, this is a book where conversations and descriptions matter. The world is really amazing, one of great wonders, secret police, false gods, and AI but one that is falling apart, not dying just falling apart. There is some body modification, a goth cyber mix, with giant mechanical robots. Gender fluidity, and writing that will make one read passages over because of how great it is written. The biggest problem is the narration gets a little odd a just past the half way part, and does make the set up and ending a little hard in some places to stay with. This could be first book in a series problems. but I can see where a lot of people would have a problem. Again close reading will help with that, but I can see where people wouldn't want to put in the effort.

A hard science fiction to categorize. This is a big story, with a lot of places to go and a lot of potential. Being the first book in the series, problems might be ironed out in the next books, but I still enjoyed it. And want to know more. This is the first book by Emma Mieko Candon I have read, though I think I did read some short stories, and maybe a Star Wars story. I enjoyed this and look forward to more in the series.

The Archive Undying is a complicated, complex book with unexpected moments of humor and a certain denseness to its prose. (In the sense that you have to work your way slowly through the narrative so you don't miss anything important. And also in the sense that there's richness and poetry in the prose, even when the characters curse like hungover sailors.) This is a book that will take a while to get through because there is so much going on, but there's never a sense that the writer is just throwing details at you. Instead, the narrative is threaded through with hints of backstory and worldbuilding.

Let's say it took a while to read it, as I had to stop a few chapters in and start over so I could take notes. (This is not a strike against the book, it's just that I had zipped through two faster-paced books previously and hadn't anticipated that the third book would be knocking me upside the head with trippy worldbuilding combined with a post-apocalyptic far-future feel.)

Our Protagonist is Sunai, who is one of the very few survivors of his city-state when the AI running it "corrupted." (Though, "survivor," may be more or less a misnomer.) In this setting, artificial or "autonomous" intelligences are considered divine--by at least the people living under their aegis at least. A group referred to as "Harbor" makes mecha (called "ENGINES") out of corrupted "frag" tech from the dead AI-cities and forces also-corrupted human survivors (called "relics") to pilot the ENGINES. Harbor is in a cold war (Or maybe a medium hot one) with an AI Empire and also the various independent AIs.

This is a fate that Sunai has been attempting to avoid for a really long time now. Our protagonist has been working as a "salvage-rat" with various crews that go out to the ruins of corrupted cities to retrieve/scavenge from them. This is a job that makes it easy to hide because he's never in the same place for very long. (Though he does turn out to have a Reputation.)

Because Sunai makes Excellent Life Choices (this is sarcasm by the way. Sunai does not in fact make excellent life choices. He makes excessively terrible life choices. This is because of trauma and various issues Sunai can't get therapy for due to being a fugitive and simply refusing to acknowledge his issues are in fact issues). he wakes up on a rig, having apparently had a one-night stand after a bender. With his current employer, a man named Veyadi. Veyadi needs Sunai's very specific help in exploring a mysterious shrine. This leads to a sequence of events that will definitely draw the attention of Harbor, and possibly doom Sunai to having to get in the robot.

This story comes together in slow twists and turns as motivations and relationships are revealed. At the core of the story is what's revealed to be Sunai's ambivalent relationship with Iterate Fractal, before, during, and after its corruption and death. Sunai and Iterate Fractal's relationship is at the core of the story and one of the ones I found the most interesting. (Aside from Sunai's general inability to make good life choices ever, and his general unreliable narrator about the people in his life and his relationships with them.)

The Archive Undying is a solid novel with engaging characters and amazing worldbuilding. It's a slow read, but that is not a mark against it given the style of writing and depth of description and characterization. It's an adventure with a hint of romance and an interesting take on the mech subgenre.

This review is based on a galley copy acquired via NetGalley.

WOW, this is a ride, in so many ways. I really dig SFF that drops me in without explanations and lets me learn the world through context, and I adore a book that really asks me to do a lot of thinking and piecing together and interpreting subtleties. I'm a go-with-the-flow reader, I don't really go back to look again at anything or look up words as I read, I trust the narrative to make sense eventually. This book satisfies and rewards all of that!! I found it a little denser than is ideal for me, but dense in that lush, humid way where you're a little out of breath all the time. I don't think i fully have a grasp on the world or the nuances of the plot, which makes it feel pleasantly surreal and makes me really excited for the next book.

I do feel fully invested in and in love with the main characters, which makes the whole thing work for me. Sunai is such a mensch!!! Veyadi tries hard and loves with ragged edges! Everyone is a personality and a delight even when they're deceiving each other and switching sides and screwing up and hating themselves, and I think it's because Sunai's POV is so tender and generous. He's a big mess, and is willing to accept and forgive the messiness of the people he loves; how could he, wounded as he is, expect anyone else to be flawless? It makes me love him, and makes me love everyone who loves him.

Other highlights for me are the complexities of personhood presented here: there are corrupted AI gods and humans damaged by their interfaces, there are intelligences within intelligences and fragments of being and surprising mergers of thought and self. It's like a political conflict happening inside a funhouse, with pleasingly incomplete religious underpinnings that put me in mind of A Psalm for the Wild-Built, except it's nothing like that book at all in tone or temperament. More like if A Psalm for the Wild-Built and Seth Dickinson's Masquerade series had a baby. Also, love to see mlm main characters, which seems fairly rare still in this kind of epic speculative fiction, plus interesting gender things going on in general! Also also, i'm such a sucker for Asian-based SFF worlds, and this one has that feel: some East Asian, some Southeast, some South, flavoring the names and the language and the food and the feel without any one-to-one mapping of cultures in this book onto cultures in the real world.

DNF @ 17%
Truthfully I’m confused and bored and I don’t see that changing.

I do enjoy Candon’s prose aesthetically, there’s already been several impactful lines but it isn’t very descriptive. I am usually very good at creating my own mental image when reading but there’s not enough surrounding descriptors to help me with that.

The story is also where I am getting stuck. I like the idea of our MC not remember anything and some weird omniscient voice helping them all while investigating shrines (very legend of Zelda coded). But I feel like I’m missing too many vital pieces of information that I need to have learned at this point to know what’s going on in the slightest.

I am extremely bummed that I’m not enjoying this, to the point where I have no interest in reading, as this was one of my anticipated reads for this year. But nothing about this first 17% has inspired me to keep reading.

I received an ARC of this book from Tordotcom in exchange for an honest review.

The Archive Undying reminds me of Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit. Both are novels in which the protagonist is haunted by a voice in their head, a voice which is both character and plot device, a voice whose mysterious intentions are key to the story but unspool slowly over time. Both use detailed, often visceral descriptions of physical acts to ground a world full of complex terminology that is rarely explained to the reader. And both are concerned with hard, world-remaking decisions that force their protagonists to question the principles that have become as ingrained in them as the other mind that's grafted to them. For the most part, this parallel is high praise--Ninefox Gambit remains one of my favorite books of the last decade, and I enjoy being dropped into a world that I have to figure out mostly through the characters' eyes rather than through infodumps. However, The Archive Undying sometimes lacks the aesthetic appeal of Ninefox Gambit's imagery. The choice to shift points of view and include several second-person sections, while part of the book's ultimate payoff, does make the early sections slower going. Still, I found the book to be rewarding and full of creative detail, and look forward to any potential sequels.

Sunai, the main protagonist (and Kel Cheris analogue, for those Ninefox Gambit fans out there) grew up serving the AI god Iterate Fractal, a god that proved to be both more and less mortal than its followers expected. (Sidenote: many of the AI names in this book--also Reconcile Elegy, Register Parse, Acrimony Covenant--remind me of the moth names in Ninefox Gambit; they have a bit of that same mathematical flavor.) On the one hand, Iterate Fractal fell victim to the same mysterious corruption as most other AIs, killing most of its followers and destroying large parts of its city-state in a slightly-horrifying-to-read-about explosion of white roots. On the other hand, despite longstanding belief that something about Iterate Fractal prevented its resurrection as a human-piloted mecha robot called an ENGINE, it appears that an Iterate Fractal ENGINE has in fact been developed. Sunai's journey begins without a clear purpose--ever since the collapse of his former life, he's been on the run, hiding his true nature as a "relic" with some fragment of the AI's power. This meandering early section of the book suffers slightly from the lack of a clear direction and the absence of clear imagery to help the reader stay grounded. Without having established the signature traits of Sunai, his lover and potential betrayer Vayadi, or the relevant AIs, the story is sometimes bogged down in hard-to-follow conversations and internal monologues. As more details of the world emerge (and I let go of the need to understand every scrap of personal history the characters were obliquely referencing) the book became easier to follow. By the time Sunai and Vayadi are headed to Iterate Fractal's former home of Khuon Mo, I was fully engrossed.

One particular aspect of the story merits special attention for helped to elevate it from a fun but relatively standard mecha story to something more complex with a richer texture. At various points in the story, Sunai cites and describes quasi-religious short texts (I imagine them being somewhat equivalent to psalms or Bible excerpts) called Leaves. Each Leaf, usually numbered, tells a short story about an Emanation of God (a Buddha-like figure, in my reading) and is interpreted in various ways by its readers--be they humans or AIs. I often find the excerpted fictional texts within books to be more interesting than the main plot, and especially in the early sections here the Leaves kept me interested in the world when Sunai himself was doing a less-than-satisfactory job. By keeping them brief, the author does a good job of not disrupting the flow of the story. Including the exegeses by various human and AI characters cast the audience in the role of interpreter as well, giving us the opportunity to draw our own conclusions about both the text itself and its in-universe readers.

Four and a half stars. A complex puzzle that would likely benefit from, and reward, a less plot-focused re-reading.

Sunai is running from a lot of things-- his past, the remnants of the AI gods that once walked the earth, himself. But when he signs up for a job while drunk, he's bitten off more than he can chew. Whether he likes it or not, his past is right behind him.

Like Sunai, I feel like I bit off more than I could chew. I was confused at least 75% of the time between switching POV characters and switching alliances. The book is marvelously clever and beautifully written but frequently teeters between sharing too little information to spark the reader's interest and just being an exercise in frustration. Words often do not mean what I think they should mean. It's a compelling story, but even after weeks of reflecting, I don't think it's for me. That said, books should be recognized for doing something interesting even if they aren't perfect, and boy does this book do a lot of interesting things. Check out Rebecca Roanhorse's excellent review on Goodreads-- she says it much better than I can.

On the positive side, without question, Sunai was my favorite part. His unrepentant snark, stubbornness, and insouciant attitude towards death grabbed my attention immediately and makes him a phenomenal POV character.

DNF 50%

This was a book that from the first page I felt I would truly love. The writing style was beautiful and the characters were rich and complex people. The only problem? I had no idea what was going on.

The author obviously did incredible world building, but there wasn’t a way to let us in. The more I thought I was grasping of the world, the more was thrown at us, so I felt more clueless as I went along. I’m still not sure what happened to Sunai and the motivations were all over the place.

I had to give up when there were more experimental POVs that got thrown in. Reading felt like a chore, like I had to do research to understand what was happening, and it was just exhausting.

This was a fun and funny story along the lines of The Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven as the title implies. Cade, our compromised Fortune Mage narrator, is a wonderful guide through this world of violence, danger, and warring forces from beyond the mortal world. The magic is based on mages drawing on powers from different plains depending on their “affinity” and bringing those powers into our world breaks something. I loved this aspect of the story. I liked the way the story is told to us with small “interruptions” by Cade talking directly to us.


Characters
Sebastian De Castell has really good characters. They are fully realized and aside from Fidick I didn’t feel like they were one dimensional. I wish we had more time to see them in action as a group and as individuals, but even with the small parts we see they feel like rounded characters.

Atmosphere
Its very easy to immerse yourself in the world that Sebastian has created.

Writing
Good writing. You can tell thought went into it to make sure it was precisely want is needed.

Plot
A simple plot, but with plenty of twists and turns along the way.

Investment
I had a really hard time putting this book done.

Logic
The rules of the world that were put out were followed and subverted when necessary, the right way.

Enjoyment
Lots and lots of enjoyment, between watching Cade try and be a “bad” guy and the rest of the groups antics as they group together.

Sunai wanders a land where the Gods have destroyed it's priests and cities. Sunai does not age and he cannot die but he is a tormented soul. He joins an expedition that changes his path and brings old friends and new lovers together. I thought this was a great book that combines AI, Gods and giant Robots.

DNF at 30%.

Too much going on in this world without enough explanation. I'm all for throwing your reader into an elaborate and imaginative world, but you've gotta give at least a little bit of explanation. This story lacked that kind of narrative, choosing instead of drag readers along for the ride. Again, I'm not against that sort of story... but there needs to be a little bit of narrative to give context to things.

Seventeen years ago the city of Khuon Mo died. Died alongside its AI god and all its people. Died, only to see one of its people returned to life, the god’s favorite doubter. In those seventeen years Sunai has found himself un-aging, unable to die, and on the run from a past he cannot quite find it in himself to face. So he drowns himself in vices, in drugs and drink and men, finding community in short bites as a guide for those seeking something between the cities. A chance meeting and an unwise night with a doctor who could prove more dangerous to him than anyone else alive will throw Sunai into a confrontation with his past and all that remains of a god machine that should have been long dead.

I find myself both fascinated and a touch frustrated by The Archive Undying. Candon builds a world with layers upon layers of history with plenty of room for the reader to poke at things that are mentioned as significant but not greatly compounded on because Sunai, the protagonist, knows them well enough to not need or want to explain them to himself. But also a world peopled with characters who have as many or more layers, who have hidden depths and agendas that are, likewise, not spelled out for the reader until they become relevant to the story as it unfolds. That is actually a lot of where my frustration comes from as well though.

The last third or so of the book becomes an unraveling of shifting alliances and intentions that become, if not difficult to follow, a bit unmoored feeling. Things that mostly make sense for the characters in retrospect, but that would have been difficult or impossible to put together before hand. This is largely mitigated by Sunai being just as caught off guard as the reader is. But the nature of it means that there is little I can talk about regarding it without totally changing the light the characters are cast in.

That said, I greatly enjoyed a lot of the character work. Sunai especially threaded the line between clownish and self-loathing delightfully. Vendadi too, is a mess of secrets and hidden motives and incredibly sincere concern for Sunai. All of the major characters played off each other quite nicely, especially with the differing levels of history between everyone. Even more so, I think with the differences between character's knowledge of each other from the past versus who they had become in intervening years, the truest selves kept hidden from the world. It is, in many ways, both the best of the book and the shakiest. Shaky in that, towards the very end, all the reveals felt like they were piling up, that no one was who Sunai had been lead to believe they were. It wound up feeling like too much too fast, but with no real room to expand or take things slower. But then, it all fit too, none of the characters we focus on are in any position to be entirely honest about who they are or what they’re about.

I admit too, that the characters are a lot of what I remember because it felt like there was just so, so much going on. Both on the character side of things, with everyone’s various goals and something going wrong with Sunai, and just on the pile up of everything happening. Things move both very slowly and extremely quickly. There are sections from unidentified but clearly AI viewpoints where the speaker could be one of several options. Even given that they tend to talk to or about Sunai does not greatly help clarify things. It is brilliant and horrifically difficult to keep track of at points.

Like, I loved reading The Archive Undying. Loved trying to piece together the bits of story that had been presented and trying to figure where the characters fit. And I am most definitely looking forward to seeing what Candon does next, both in general and in the Downworld Sequence. But I have no idea who to suggest this book too. It is not hard science fiction, but it is too sci-fi to be really science fantasy. The fantasy aspects are sharp and bright, with strange creatures who have been formed by the various AI gods. I gets a five out of five from me and I want more of it, but I am not entirely sure what it is.

5/5 Stars // 10/10 // 100/100

No notes. buy this book if you love NGE, if you love sentient A.I. with hilarious and darkly humorously personalities. Read this book if you love good, well-written scifi.

I'm sure The Archive Undying is a great book. However, I did not finish this book because of the tense/way this book's writing was going. I only managed to read a couple of pages because of this. I tried a couple days ago to redownload the book to give an example of the tense used in the novel and try and give another try at reading but was unable to

"The Archive Undying" is an exquisitely composed puzzle of a novel, one that I wasn't clever enough for, but nonetheless enjoyed. I appreciate books that don't hold hands when worldbuilding - the Locked Tomb, for example, is one of my favorite series. "The Archive Undying" not only refused to hold my hand but pushed it away - I was confused for a majority of the book and resigned myself to appreciating the characters and going with the vibes, hopeful that the end would clarify a few major points. It didn't.

Sunai is an undead and undying relic from a past age - connected to corrupted AI and on the run from-- well, a lot of things. The government. HImself. Unfortunately, during a round of vigorous drinking, Sunai is embroiled in a job to-- wait, he doesn't remember. Too much of that vigorous drinking. Also? He seems to be sleeping with his employer. Sunai, what a walking dumpster fire of a character. I loved him, His self-destructive personality but still so human heart was the impetus that kept me going when I wasn't sure I could continue.

Just when I thought I had a handle on this book - "oh, okay, it's sort of a science fiction romance with mechs" it jerked the rug out from under me once again. The second half of the book has quite a few POV shifts. I won't spoil why, but it made a muddy picture even muddier, and my confused-but-amiable "four stars" downgraded to three.

Would I recommend this book? Yes, to a very specific reader. But not to me. I don't think it's bad so much as deliberately complex, and the characters are so charming it almost - ALMOST - makes up for it.

Thank you to Tor Publishing Group and Netgalley for this ARC.

The Archive Undying seemed totally up my alley, but in reality, it just didn't work for me. I read quite a bit of science fiction and literary fiction and I genuinely could not figure out what was going on in half the book. The author uses words, whose regular definition I'm familiar with, in a science fiction way to refer to new phenomena or technology, and then does not elaborate or explain what these words mean in this new world. I'd be willing to give this author another try in a different book because I did like their characters a lot.

I'll preface this by saying, I have absolutely no idea what was going on in this book, and I loved every minute of it. For me, sci-fi doesn't have to always be 100% comprehensible, and especially for the type of story this is, where it's obvious the author is putting a new spin on things and getting experimental, i'm ok with not getting the full picture. What I found most compelling was the characters, particularly Sunai and Venadi, they were interesting and varied and held up well as the main catalysts for the plot. I was not expecting so much of the plot to be wrapped up in romance, but I liked it and thought it was done well. The worldbuilding is fascinating, if frustrating to comprehend, since not much is explained about how the world is really set up and why, though i'm hoping future books will elaborate on it. My biggest gripe is the constant, sudden pov shifts that only get more frequent in the second half of the book, that was really when I started to lose the plot. I felt like the book needed more context, but as is I enjoyed reading this and think a lot of answers will be given in the sequel.

I want to say first and foremost that I LOVED this book. And I cannot wait for the future of the series. The world building was so rich and engrossing, so full of life and imagination. The characters were so human, and relatable, not just in and of themselves –but in their relationships with each other. The world created was just so vastly imaginative and so cool to discover. I absolutely love the way Emma names things within the world (Reconcile Elegy, So-Beloved, Register Parse, Chom Dan, Kuhon Mo).

The biggest detriment to this book is how confusing it is, and the mental weight it takes to read it. It is not a light undertaking. I had to have a separate sheet of paper to try to keep all my concepts straight. I think the biggest flaw of this novel is perhaps the execution. Which is so heartbreaking because it is such an amazing story. Many of the created concepts, while well fleshed out were just not brought across very clearly. I often found myself thinking that something worked one way and then was totally wrong when it was stated later. Its too vague sometimes for its own good which made it at times hard to get through. Not only are you learning an entire new environment and societal structure, but you are learning about entirely new concepts (The idea of God-AI city constructs and the religious implications around them) with little to no explanation at the time. I found myself struggling to differentiate between what an archive, a fragtech, an archivist, an ENGINE, or a Guardian is. Is an archive a place or a thing? And Who is what and how do they relate to each other on the scale of corrupted cities? If you stick to it and come out on the other side it comes together.

I usually can get through a novel or two a week but it took me the better part of 2 months and lots of annotations to finish this one. So I say with honesty – this novel is an undertaking to read, but I whole heartedly believe it is worth all of the effort. I felt similarly with Dune when I read it the first time. All of the new language, the new concepts, the flurry of information. I would just keep that in mind when reading. If you go into it expecting action packed Mech battles and the stories of their Pilots, this isn’t that. It is so good though and I am SO glad I got the opportunity to read it.

Thank you to Tor Publishing Group and Netgalley for an amazing ARC.

The Archive Undying is a fascinating story that is not told well. No one is more disappointed than I am. This was one of my most anticipated releases and I was prepared to add it to my favorites list right next to Gideon the Ninth and The Stars Undying.

For a long time, I held on to the hope that it was a confusing start that would have an amazing payoff. I caught glimpses of an incredible story in the complex dynamic between the two main characters and the mind-bending perspective shifts. Even when I wasn't enjoying the story I had to stop and tab some of Candon's beautiful prose. Overall I adore the concept of the story and I appreciate how unique it was. The complicated relationship between the god-like AIs and their people was fascinating. Sunai's unique experience was my favorite part of the story especially once the story started to explore his power. I especially enjoyed his complicated relationship with Adi. Their interactions were fun to read and often involved interesting discussions.

I have mixed feelings about the shifting POVs. It was the first thing in the book that I genuinely enjoyed. I love an anonymous POV that seems to know more than both the reader and the characters. I desperately wanted to know who was sharing Sunai's mind. But even my favorite part of the book slowly fell apart. There were multiple abrupt changes to how the strange POV was incorporated into the narrative that felt clunky and awkward even if they had explanations. Later in the story, we get multiple anonymous POVs which made the story impossible to follow. The perspectives didn't have unique voices or writing styles making it difficult to tell who was speaking at times. I often had to reread sections because I realized I had been imagining the wrong speaker.

The Archive Undying felt like it started five chapters in and never made up for it. The plot is poorly paced with an incredibly rushed first half and a painfully repetitive last quarter. It is difficult to care about a major plot moment when it is the third time it has happened, almost happened, or been abandoned at the last second.

There is a fine line between a book being confusing and it being nonsense with pretty writing. The Archive Undying holds back too much information from its reader to be enjoyable. Almost nothing was explained. I could put together a vague idea based on the sparse context clues but I felt robbed of any actual world-building. It felt like the author refused to flesh out any of the concepts that didn't directly involve Sunai. That includes the original cataclysmic event, the villain, the planet, and the AI themselves. The use of common word names without explanations to clarify their in-world meaning made it difficult to understand the world. This problem extends to the AI who seem more like otherworldly, god-like beings than any form of human technology no matter how evolved. I desperately wish the author had just created new "made-up" words for all of the roles in this story. There is a vague suggestion of a villain but I still have no idea who the Harbor was, what they stood for, or how they were involved with anything.

My guess is this ambiguity was meant to make the book seem mysterious and confusing (here we encounter the fine line). But in reality, there is not enough information for the reader to piece together a coherent picture. The Archive Undying is severely lacking in its world-building making it a messy and frustrating read.

What a freakin book! I almost don't even know where to start — the lush, lived-in settings from jungle to mountain to city? The perfect but terrible but loveable trashbag main character, Sunai? The deeply layered and human supporting cast? The god-king AIs that hold incredible influence over their kingdoms even after they've corrupted? Giant mechs with mysterious pilots? I could go on and on. This novel had everything I love about scifi, and while it was definitely a book that required my full attention, I enjoyed the deep dive into the world and plot. I would be remiss not to mention that this novel reminded me so much of a favorite podcast, Friends at the Table, and I can't wait for other fans to read this so we can chat! Overall, I would recommend this to lovers of mechs, AIs, unreliable narrators, and facing god to walk backward into hell.