In this world, interstellar humanity is ruled by the AI gods their ancestors created. The gods need humans, and claim their souls after death, so they mostly rule them with an eye to their well-being. Mostly. One of the greatest threats to the gods and, (perhaps?) humanity, is the Outside, a force/worldview/way of thinking that threatens reality. Humans touched by it tend to go mad, and spread their madness, so the gods are ruthless in excising Outside influence.

I love this book's world-building. The Outside is a sort of cosmic horror that is a bit more cosmic than usual, in this book. It undermines physics and causality and seems to have an agenda of destruction. The gods, on the other hand, are ruthless dictators with the agenda of all dictators: to hold on to power by whatever means necessary, but with a light touch on the day-to-day lives of their subjects. They let the worlds under their power develop independently, so long as they hew to the laws of the gods, and offer them worship.

Yasira, the protagonist, comes from a world that is better about disability and mental health than some. Her autism was celebrated and supported there, although she's encountered other attitudes when she went to school. She's trying to build an energy source that will decrease her world's dependence on god-technology. This is a problem because it turns out she's been contaminated by the Outside, but the gods are giving her a long tether to try to discover new means of confronting their old enemy.

This does not go well for Yasira, or, ultimately ,the gods.

I want people to read this, but if you don't like cosmic horror, you might not like this. It doesn't marinate in it the way Lovecraft does, but it certainly visits that territory. There's also some accounts of abuse in a therapeutic context that maps pretty well onto ABA. This is not a major theme, but it's central to one character's back-story.