Minds of Sand and Light attempts to walk a fine line between cozy sci fi romance and high-octane apocalyptic adventure, and I’m not sure it works for me. I enjoyed the book’s take on an “AI council” composed of complex AI programs that attained/evolved into sentience, and the first half of the book explored the dynamics among these AIs and a select group of humans in an interesting way and introduces the idea that AI are secretly vying for control of humanity. Oh, and that they will likely eradicate us for the good of the earth. So, that’s pretty heavy, but still an interesting take on the AI Singularity. However, at almost exactly the half-way point there was a tone change to …well, the best way to describe it is that the book became “cutesy” as a few of the AI and a few of the humans began to explore their feelings. This didn’t work for me, especially since the plot was still rather heavy (human genocide is still on the table! There’s the introduction of a forced reproductive facility!) and I found the juxtaposition jarring and the book juvenile in tone as a result.

Recommended for those who want lots of action and some robot cuddling in the midst of their AI Singularity and discussions of “kill all humans.” My thanks to the author for providing this e-arc for review.

I LOVE books about AI learning about humanity and learning to become human. There's something so endearing about it, and I eat it up every time.
Minds of Sand and Light is a little bit 1984 and a little bit Murderbot diaries, and quite a lot enjoyable.
I do think the beginning was a bit oddly placed and some characterization felt sort of abrupt? Like things happened JUST to establish characters without really an thought to the overall plot, but I think about a third of the way in, the novel found its pace. It really felt like it found its groove and it flowed so much better.
3.5 stars! Gets a whole half star for having a background cat who showed up more than once. All novels could be improved with a cat.

Wow, this book… was a hot mess. There are a few great moments but they’re mostly lost in the meandering plot and characters lacking depth.

The first few chapters of the book were pretty confusing. We are introduced to so many characters in the first chapter as we alternate between 3 different POVs. There’s Ruth and Cassie, the 7 sentient AIs, and Zheng’s crew of 4 or 5 people. Ruth is essentially the main character of this book but actually gets the least focus out of all the characters and gets lost in the chaotic introduction to the world.

Recalling the characters proves challenging, as they are either completely devoid of personality or one-dimensional side characters. Basically, no one in the whole book has a character arc or any character development. Ruth ends up exactly how she started: a flawless, mega-genius hacker. MIP/Theo is beyond generic, he’s just a nice guy with no independent motivations or goals other than helping Ruth. Botswana offers "quirky" comic relief, though its charm wears thin swiftly. Cassie’s personality amounts to happy-go-lucky and loves cats. Max is… there? Most of the other sentient AIs are basically indistinguishable from each other and essentially serve as personal assistants to the human characters for most of the book. This huge bloated cast of characters also means that there’s a lot of pointless, superfluous dialogue and conversations that go nowhere.

The relationship between MIP/Theo and Ruth seemed really forced and contrived. They haven’t even made it past the elevators before she asks him out and she’s supposed to be a journalist interviewing him! Their attraction to each other is constantly brought up in every interaction they have as if the reader would forget otherwise. Their friends are also way too invested in their potential relationship. Their relationship is literally compared to fanfic within the book itself and that is not really a compliment.

It’s pretty much expected (or at least accepted) that the sentient AIs, the “hacking,” and a lot of the tech in general are going to be unrealistic. That’s fine, it’s part of the readers’ suspension of disbelief when reading sci-fi. However, the technical capabilities of the AIs should at least be consistent instead of “whatever the plot requires at the moment.” The AIs have exponentially more processing capacity than humans (and also the ability to store huge amounts of data) so they can engage in all sorts of tech-wizardry for plot convenience—like disabling extensive camera networks. But since Ruth, a human, is the main character and is supposed to be a mega-genius, the AIs have to be dumbed down whenever required so that Ruth can prove that she’s so incredibly smart. It’s frustrating to be told that the AIs are capable of running highly accurate models to evaluate future probabilities but are also unable to do basic debugging. Ruth, a human, is able to solve coding problems (in just 5 minutes!) that the sentient AIs can’t figure out even though this is supposed to be the exact thing that AIs excel at. And she's not just equal to the AIs abilities but supposedly three times better.

For example, when they’re removing self-destructs from Zheng’s code, London, a sentient AI, says that Ruth is the only programmer in the whole world who could possibly debug this code. Ruth’s amazing suggestion which no one else in the world could have come up with is to “look at the self-destruct codes that we’ve already identified and see if there’s anything in common.” I mean, she literally spends most of the time fixing simple syntax errors in the code.

The book also has a huge problem with telling instead of showing. We are constantly told things about the world or the characters which are then not reflected in the actual text. We are told Ruth and Cassie have trauma from their past but this never actually affects how they behave (presumably because that would be too inconvenient to the plot). We are told that the AIs are brutally pragmatic and lack compassion/emotion but all of the AIs that we meet act basically exclusively on their emotions (presumably because if decisions were actually made pragmatically, there would be no story or at least none involving Ruth).

The reason why it felt like it took me so long to get through this book is because the plot is not building towards anything so there’s no sense of rising tension or escalating conflict. There’s no mystery to solve or evil plot to prevent, everyone is basically just responding to random events as they occur with no particular goal. For the first half of the book, the characters are sent on these one-off missions or tasks that result in basically nothing, regardless of whether they succeed or fail. The supposed central conflict is whether the Council will destroy humanity to prevent ecological ruin but nothing that happens in the first 90% of the book relates to this at all.

The actual resolution to this “destroy or save humanity” plot is also another case of telling instead of showing. We’re told by Cassie (and confirmed by the sentient AIs) that saving humanity from itself will require limiting freedoms but then we’re never told what exactly that would entail. Presumably, this would mean significant, mostly unwilling lifestyle changes but we’re never shown any of the characters subsequently changing their behaviors. I mean literally the next chapter is MIP and Ruth on a fancy date but like, is that reducing their carbon footprint??? Are we even trying here?

Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Voyager for providing me with a digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

I would like to thank HarperCollins for the advance copy, which was provided through NetGalley.

As my first introduction to Kylie Chan’s works, I found this novel to be a thought-provoking, insightful look into the potential dangers of artificial intelligence and the calamity that can arise when technology develops consciousness. The novel felt very reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984 especially with ‘The Party’, and the autocratic nature of the society. As a fan of Orwell’s novels, I mean this only as a compliment, and I found myself engrossed by Chan’s unique and layered world-building, and how quickly she can immerse the reader in the story.

There was also much more humour than I originally expected going in, particularly with the dynamics between the different artificial intelligences. The range of different perspectives and the mix between third person and robotic transcripts also helped ensure the story remained fresh and kept me engaged as a reader.

Whilst it did draw on some of the tropes found in other dystopian texts, the constant twists and turns helped keep me on the edge of my seat, and offered a fresh take on the genre. My main criticism would be that I found the novel took a while to get started, and even as an avid reader of science fiction books I found the first few chapters to be quite confusing. This was largely due to the wide range of characters and vocabulary, which are introduced over a short period. Once I became familiar with the characters and style of the text, this issue quickly disappeared. The second and third acts moved at breakneck speed, and I found myself struggling to put the book down.

Overall, I found the book to be an action-packed, thrilling read and I am looking forward to exploring more of Chan’s works in the future. This book is great for anyone craving the next science fiction or dystopian read and will be sure to recommend this to anyone wanting an exciting and innovative read.

This was a review release given to me by netgalley.

This is a book about an evil communist party of China AI driven to enslave the world, surrounded by a council of petty bickering AIs. Our hero is a brilliant young programmer/journalist who gets entangled in the battle between the council and the party.

The world building is amazing and interesting.

The second act is not good. It changes to a weird slapstick tone during a raid on an evil CCP Party female "farm." There is also a weird relationship between a robot and a woman that is more akin to bad Data slash fiction.

This book would get 5 stars for the world, but loses 2 stats for the robot romance, and toneless humor.