English language
Published Dec. 17, 2023 by Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom.
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.
WHEN AN AI DIES, ITS CITY DIES WITH IT WHEN A CITY FALLS, IT LEAVES A CORPSE BEHIND WHEN THAT CORPSE RUNS OFF, ONLY DEVOTION CAN BRING IT BACK
When the robotic god of Khuon Mo went mad, it destroyed everything it touched. It killed its priests, its city, and all its wondrous works. But in its final death throes, the god brought one thing back to life: its favorite child, Sunai. 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. He's run as far as he can from the wreckage of his faith, drowning himself in drink, drugs, and men. But when Sunai wakes up in the …
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.
WHEN AN AI DIES, ITS CITY DIES WITH IT WHEN A CITY FALLS, IT LEAVES A CORPSE BEHIND WHEN THAT CORPSE RUNS OFF, ONLY DEVOTION CAN BRING IT BACK
When the robotic god of Khuon Mo went mad, it destroyed everything it touched. It killed its priests, its city, and all its wondrous works. But in its final death throes, the god brought one thing back to life: its favorite child, Sunai. 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. He's run as far as he can from the wreckage of his faith, drowning himself in drink, drugs, and men. 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.
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.
A lot of ideas crammed into a story about post AI apocalypse. Would have been better if some were left out. I liked some of the characters some of the time.
The world building, the characters, the whole first act are pitch perfect and beautifully written.
The second half is too much about the overly cute thing where you have to guess who is speaking, and to whom. It gets grating, but if I can make it through Nona The Ninth, I can make it through this.
What really hurt was just the way scifi-magic was used. It didn't have an internal logic, and I couldn't find the emotional truth in it. If you want magic in your book, you need one or more of those things. Stuff just kinda happens and it's not clear who's doing what, if they're doing the right thing or the wrong thing, or when something goes wrong if it was predictable or a surprise.
The world building has so much show, but the space magic is basically all tell. If it only happened a few …
The world building, the characters, the whole first act are pitch perfect and beautifully written.
The second half is too much about the overly cute thing where you have to guess who is speaking, and to whom. It gets grating, but if I can make it through Nona The Ninth, I can make it through this.
What really hurt was just the way scifi-magic was used. It didn't have an internal logic, and I couldn't find the emotional truth in it. If you want magic in your book, you need one or more of those things. Stuff just kinda happens and it's not clear who's doing what, if they're doing the right thing or the wrong thing, or when something goes wrong if it was predictable or a surprise.
The world building has so much show, but the space magic is basically all tell. If it only happened a few times it would be easier, but most of the action is cyberpunk magic action. If you don't have any way to reason about what the characters are or aren't capable of, there's little joy in watching them struggle besides the spectacle of the struggle itself. Maybe that's the point? I felt like I was inhabiting the Downworld, but the ego death stuff just didn't land.
A map would have really been appreciated, considering the frequency of place names and how much time is spent traveling.
For my money, it's Evangelion. It even has an echo of the famous kitchen scene! There are a few others like Sovereign attacking the frag (so glad we spent so much time with Sov, shame she never matters to the plot!) and the big cover robot picking up Sunai (who is an incredibly cool character and gets some awesome moments.) Maybe I'm totally off-base here, but the way the pilots are inexorably bound by their trauma to their horrific giant robots felt very Eva. That and the character very much not wanting to get in the robot.
tl;dr cool world, cool characters, strong beginning, tries too hard at the end.
The worldbuilding premise here is that this world previously had cities run by AI gods (yes, exactly that problematic of a power dynamic) who have mostly become corrupted and destroyed. The Harbor builds giant ENGINE robots from corrupted god corpses as a protection mechanism against frenzied robotic fragments of those same gods. Sunai was in contact with Iterate Fractal (the AI of Khuon Mo) when it died, and became immortal and unaging. He's tried to run away and escape, but when he hears that the Harbor has seemingly impossibly built an ENGINE from Iterate Fractal he's eventually sucked back into trying to understand why and maybe kill and/or save what he can of the scraps of Iterate Fractal.
(Yes, all of the AIs have amazing names like Reconcile Elegy, Perish Aflame, and Fun-Sized Exultation in Perpetuity.)
This book asked a lot of me as a reader. It's very dissociative, literally …
The worldbuilding premise here is that this world previously had cities run by AI gods (yes, exactly that problematic of a power dynamic) who have mostly become corrupted and destroyed. The Harbor builds giant ENGINE robots from corrupted god corpses as a protection mechanism against frenzied robotic fragments of those same gods. Sunai was in contact with Iterate Fractal (the AI of Khuon Mo) when it died, and became immortal and unaging. He's tried to run away and escape, but when he hears that the Harbor has seemingly impossibly built an ENGINE from Iterate Fractal he's eventually sucked back into trying to understand why and maybe kill and/or save what he can of the scraps of Iterate Fractal.
(Yes, all of the AIs have amazing names like Reconcile Elegy, Perish Aflame, and Fun-Sized Exultation in Perpetuity.)
This book asked a lot of me as a reader. It's very dissociative, literally and figuratively. There's buried betrayals, backstabbing, and ongoing playing of both sides. Character motivations also change over time, and so there's never a simple answer to why and what they want. There's even some antimemetic properties in play where people have done things they don't remember. There's trauma big and small and divine. There's a surprising amount of sudden second person perspective shifts, flashbacks, and mental interjections of things both Sunai and the reader don't understand. There are excellent authorial reasons for all of these choices that pay off in the end but ... it's also A LOT.
"I guess, it's just, is there something I should know about archivists?" Dzira uses the Imperial Standard word for "archivist"--the one with connotations of libraries and record-keeping. The word in Mohani is a synonym for "vital organs."
Much akin to Ninefox Gambit and the Machineries of Empire series, The Archive Undying drops you into a world and doesn't bother to explain what basic words mean. Words like "relic" and "ENGINE" and "frags" mostly got explained to me in the end, but I am still not sure I could explain to you what an "archive" is more generally. Personally, this ambiguity was catnip for me and I dig a slow burn lore reveal.
In a similar worldbuilding sense, I also feel like this book drops you in halfway and doesn't give you a helping hand. There's a lot of backstory that gets handwaved at, such as a Cradle that was abandoned, previous wars where the Harbor got started, and what the heck even is the Immaculate Empire. It's all delicious and I want to know it all but it felt akin to reading Witch King recently where you almost wish there was a previous or follow-up book to just to dig into everything happening on the sidelines. However, all of this world context is just marginalia to a story that focuses on one specific dead god and its city, two "individuals" in emotional orbit around it and each other, and the fluctuating love/hate relationships connecting all of them together.
All of this makes a lot of the book very crunchy and messy. I had to be very engaged while reading it, but I felt an ongoing intrigued frustration with the uncertainty and unknown that kept me interested. It all worked for me, but I would give this a conditional recommendation.
