DNF 34%

So, "The Archive Undying" didn't quite hit the mark for me. The plot felt all over the place, and I just couldn't get into it, you know? Ended up marking it as a Did Not Finish (DNF).

Everyone's got their own taste, so maybe this book will click with someone else. But for now, I'm moving on to something else that suits me better.

I wanted to live this book. I tried to love this book. I was unable to love this book, as I found I just wasn't interested in the plight of the characters. However, I plan on giving it another try as I think the premise is interesting.

My first thought upon finishing this book was "thank god that's over"... which isn't a good sign.
I liked the writing style, but I don't remember a single thing that happened in this book. The plot felt directionless. It's really unfortunate since it had such great potential. I did like Sunai as a lead character, but all other characters were ultimately forgettable. Probably should have DNF'd.
1.5⭐️

I had a really difficult time following the plot in this book.

However I can see there were wonderful ideas being presented. I seriously wanted to find a way to enjoy this. I actually love unreliable narrators and being thrust into the story without the reader really knowing what is going on, and I was really hoping for payoff at some point in this story. However the longer I read, the more I realized that the plot was being rushed and I wasn't having a fun time with it anymore.

This is a shame because I really love this concept! Maybe it needed more time in the oven?

Thank you very much for this advanced readers copy.

I was intrigued by this book,, but it just didn't hold my interest all the way through. I stopped listening around 35% and just couldn't bring myself to finish the book. I'm not always put off by being thrown into the middle of a strange world with no scene setting, but it just didn't work for me in this case. I hope this book finds people who love it though!

I’m always excited to dive into a new book about disability by a disabled author and this one did not disappoint! I definitely missed a lot of the references to mecha because I’m not very familiar with that genre, but nonetheless, this was a highly entertaining. A fascinating mash up of fantasy and sci-fi!

The premise of this sounded so good but it ended up feeling more like a slog to get through. AI run large mechas that are worshiped and have many followers and priests. But when the city that the AI protects is destroyed these Ais go insane. By the end of the book I just didn’t care that much about what was happening even as it felt a bit rushed. This series isn’t for me and I will not be picking up the next one until I see how other people feel about it.

This was incredibly confusing, and I loved every minute of it. The Locked Tomb and The Broken Earth Trilogy have convinced me that I am a sucker for an incredibly confusing sci-fi novel, and The Archive Undying was no exception.

Important to Note:
- The genre is GodPunk, GODPUNK, which is just very cool if you ask me.
- You will be confused, that's okay - just roll with it.
- There is not any romance so keep this in mind going-in.
- Large robots + AI
- Multi POVs in multiple tenses
- Complex and dynamic characters.

--4.25/5

Thank you to netgalley for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Some books make an assumption; they drop you right in with a group of characters, a world, and a plot that feels like it's already in full tilt, and it expects you to accept that and catch up eventually. Usually the characters feed you a little bit of back story, give you some emotional grounding, and you start to piece things together bit by bit. But the characters were so inscrutable and so narratively distant, that they offered us nothing more than the dialogue and description on the page. Suddenly you realize that the plot has carried on without you and you have no idea who anyone is or what's actually happening. You don't know anyone's motivations, you don't understand the rules of the world, you don't recognize much of anything if it disappears for a few pages and then reappears. It felt like the glue between all the different things that make up a story were missing.

My review here is going to be at least partially influenced by having made the mistake of reading the reviews page shortly after I finished the book. Would this book have benefitted from a glossary? Probably yes, as there were times that I got a bit lost. However, not everything has to be spoonfed to the reader! Yes, there's a lot of narration POV jumps (frequent second person, second person plural, first person, first person plural, and the good old fashioned third person), however, the font and the way each POV speaks gives a clue as to who it is. The best way I can describe this is mech fiction that focuses on the pilots, the mechs also have power levels that approach/are themselves treated as divinity, where the fantasy vibes are given equal weight as the sci-fi vibes (and if you're getting Destiny vibes from the cover, it's because was done by Destiny 2 concept artist Sung Choi!). There's fluid identity, possession, messy ass relationships, people coping poorly with the aftermath of trauma, and some absolutely gorgeous descriptions. Yes, it's Ms. Candon's first non-spec work (she wrote Star Wars: Ronin and has a story in the new From A Certain Point of View) novel, and it feels like there is a LOT going on, but I was able to follow the story, and I would LOVE to see more of Sunai and Veydani if Ms. Candon chooses to continue it. And if you're having trouble following what's going on, don't worry, I'll post a spoiler comment nested that explains it real thoroughly for you. Pick this up. It's deeply unlike anything out there, and I can't wait to see more from her. The narrator does a solid job here, and helps a little bit with making sense of things!

I ended up not really connecting with this book the 2 times I tried picking it up. The narrator was really good and the book sounds good so maybe I just wasn't in the mood. Maybe I'll try again in the future and I'll update my review if I do.

This book was a DNF for me. I found it confusing (and I typically love complex fantasy/sci-fi narratives), and never really grasped onto a plot. Seriously, what is this book even about?

DNF at 48%

This book was jarring and unfocused, and I found the narration to be incredibly annoying - the main character was insufferable. In half the book I didn't find anything to care about.

I made a mistake in trying this book. Someone whose recommendations I trust so much loved this book, so I decided to give it a try. This was the equivalent of a freshman signing up for a 300 level course. I do not read sci fi in any capacity, and this book expects you to be able to take the world building and run with it. I had to DNF it after two attempts purely because I could not understand what was going on with the AIs.

If you're interested in this book and you have experience with some intense sci fi, give this book a shot. If you're a beginner like me, maybe come back for this one after a few easier reads. I am giving three stars because I honestly have no negatives to say other than it was just too difficult for me to comprehend.

Thank you to Macmillan Audio and NetGalley for this audio ARC!

The Archive Undying is a fractured story about broken people in a shattered world. Everything about this story, the people, the place, even the story itself, is in jagged pieces.

But with everything in jagged pieces, while it makes the characters compelling, and the world they live in a fascinating puzzle, the fractured jaggedness of the story itself makes the whole thing hard to follow.

Which makes describing the thing more than a tad difficult. Because you’re never quite sure what’s going on – even after the end – because you don’t know how anything or anyone got to be who, where and what they were at the point things start. Or even what the point of what they did might have been.

That’s true of the characters, the institutions and the whole entire world they inhabit. Because it’s all been corrupted. Not by the usual human forms of corruption – well, honestly, that too – but because everything in this world was run by autonomous AIs, and someone or something, both in the distant past and in the immediate present, introduced corruption into those AIs’ codes that caused them to fall. And to die.

At least as much as an AI can die.

So the story begins with Sunai. Or at least the story we drop into begins from Sunai’s point of view. He’s a salvage rat hiding a bitter truth from himself – but as it turns out Sunai is lies and bitter truths pretty much all the way down.

So is everyone – and everything – else. But the more of all those perspectives of lies and deceptions and bitter truths and sorrows we see, the more it all comes back to Sunai. And to the bitterest truth of all that he has hidden so deep that it will take an invasion of rogue mechs and rapacious AIs destroying his city to finally bring it to light.

Escape Rating B: I listened to The Archive Undying in its entirety, and I have to say that its the narrator that carried me through all SIXTEEN AND A HALF HOURS. The narrator didn’t just do a good job of voicing all the many, many characters, but by literally being in their heads and not my own it allowed me to care enough about the individuals to be willing to experience the whole constantly twisting saga. If I’d been reading this as text, if I’d been in my head instead of theirs, I’d have DNF’d fairly early because the sheer number of changes in perspectives combined with unsatisfying hints of the world they occurred in would have driven me mad in short order. YMMV.

The Archive Undying is a story that expects a lot from its readers, probably more than it is likely to get. Which is somewhat ironic, as Sunai, the being who stands more-or-less as its protagonist has learned to expect very little, and is often surprised when he gets even that.

But then, that’s the thing about this book, in that if the reader can come to care about the characters, particularly Sunai the failed archivist and reluctant relic, then that reader will stick with the story to see what happens to Sunai and the ragtag band of friends, allies, frenemies and rogue AIs who have attached themselves to him. Or that he has attached himself to accidentally or by someone else’s purpose.

The story has so many perspectives, and it jumps between them so frequently and with so little provocation, that the story is difficult to follow. But more often than the reader expects, all of those fractured pieces come together in beauty – just the way the bits of color in a kaleidoscope suddenly shift into a glorious – if temporary – whole.

I left this story with three completely separate – almost jagged – thoughts about it.

Because we spend this story inside pretty much all of the characters’ heads – even the characters that don’t technically HAVE heads, and because so many of their actions have gone horribly wrong and they’re all full to the brim with regret and angst, this struck me as a ‘woulda, coulda, shoulda’ kind of story. We see their thoughts, they’re all a mess all the time, they’ve all screwed up repeatedly, and they’re all sorry about almost everything they’ve done – even as they keep doing the thing they’re sorry about.

Second, as a question of language, and because I listened to this rather than read the text, I got myself caught up in the question of whether the word, and more of the characters than at first seemed, was ‘relic’ or ‘relict’ as they’re pronounced the same. Sunai, and others, are referred to as ‘relics’ of the mostly dead AI named Iterate Fractal – or one of its brethren. But a ‘relic’ is an object of religious significance from the past, and a ‘relict’ is a survivor of something that used to exist in a larger or active form but no longer does. Not all of the autonomous AIs were worshipped as gods, but they all left relicts behind.

There’s a part of me that keeps thinking that at its heart, The Archive Undying is a love story. Not necessarily a romance – but rather a story about the many and varied ways that love can turn toxic and wrong. To the point where even when it does come out right the selected value of right is tenuous and likely to break at the first opportunity.

An opportunity we’ll eventually get to see. The Archive Undying is the first book in the projected Downworld Sequence, implying that there will be more to come even if the when of it is ‘To Be Determined’. I think I got invested in the characters enough to see what happens to them next – and I have hope that maybe the many, many blanks in the explanation of how things got to be this bad will get filled in in that next or subsequent books in the duology. But after the way this first book went, I KNOW I’ll be getting that second one in audio because the narration of this first book by Yung-I Chang is what made the whole thing possible for me and I expect him to carry me through the next one as well.

The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon feels like a highly experimental work. There was obviously a lot of thought put into the story. The characters are fleshed out pretty well from the beginning, but the overall story gets more confusing as it goes along. This was not a book for me and I stopped about 40% into it. It was not bad, but I had a hard time understanding what was happening and why. A little more world building before unleashing the main character in their quest would have probably made it a little easier. It's a very interesting concept but overall, I could not get into it.

Sad to say that this was a real struggle to finish. I loved the premise of a post-apocalyptic AI god world that gets destroyed when the AI god goes mad. Like, that sounded cool! However, it was tough to keep up with the switching of POV throughout the book. This book was very much a character-driven novel. However, I felt I needed more world-building to understand what was happening.

Thank you, NetGalley and Macmillan Audio!
If you love complex and tricky sci-fi, this is definitely the book for you. The story's premise really dragged me in with the AI gods and resurrection. Sunai was one of my favorite things about the story, as he is extremely nuanced and really likable. Seeing the broken world through his perspective and story contributes to the erie and ominous vibes. This is definitely a complex story and needs a lot of processing time. There definitely needs to be a little bit more details with some of the world-building and character choices, but I still think it is very enjoyable as someone who likes confusing books.

The prose in this book was so lovely at times that I had to stop and really take it in. Sunai is interesting and likeable, and his relationships with other characters are engaging and at times unpredictable. The world is also intensly interesting, but deeply confusing. We are fed information a little too sparsely to really understand what is going on. Overall, the deep sense of confusion that I felt pulled me too much out of the story and made me unable to finish it. I think this is a really neat world, and I would have enjoyed exploring it more if I felt a little less lost about Sunai's past, exactly what and who he is and what he's harboring inside of him, and just a lot of other stuff along the way.

I think this book will be fantastic for folks who like a bit of a puzzle or who are comfortable being suspended in confusion, and I think it might have been a little more manageable if I had a physical copy to refer to.

The narrator of the audiobook was top notch.

I've been anticipating this book ever since I read Emma Mieko Candon's Star Wars novel, Ronin, and it exceeded every expectation I had. Every character had so much depth, and I found myself wanting more of all of them at the end of this book. Emma has such a strong ability to pull you in and get you so deeply invested within just the first few chapters.
This book is also a compelling look at artificial intelligence in a way that only an author as talented as Emma would be able to afford it the nuance they do. It is science-fiction in its best form, and it reminded me exactly what I love about the genre.
In addition, the audiobook is beautifully narrated and a fantastic way to experience this story.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough, and all sci-fi lovers should give it a read!