Jesse C's Reviews > Exadelic

This book is an absolute trip. It starts out as a seemingly pretty badly put together story where a super powerful AI starts acting out against humans it perceives as a threat (nothing like the caliber of Nagata's The Red trilogy). But all that is revealed to be just a front and the book takes a hard-swerve into the DoDo lane, where suddenly we have "science" being used to do "magic". And okay, it seems like this might be it . . . . nope, now we've got The Terminator and then the multiverse, and then Heinlein and L Ron Hubbard show up as a characters, and then when you think you might have a handle on this entire sprawling mess, it swerves one more time into something both stranger and more banal.

It shouldn't work. It honestly doesn't work a lot of the time, instead just propelling itself forward by refusing to ever look down (the Wiley Coyote school of plotting). Invisible Armies remains one of my very favorite techno-thrillers simply for how grounded in the (now somewhat dated) tech of its time. This . . . . is not that. There are definitely a lot of fun easter eggs for the more techie people and Evan's insane take on AI gone rogue can be fun at times, but this ultimately is more a collection of batshit plot devices and less a robust novel. Still a pretty good time.