Review of "The Archive Undying" by Emma Mieko Candon

I received an ARC of this book from Tordotcom in exchange for an honest review.

The Archive Undying reminds me of Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit. Both are novels in which the protagonist is haunted by a voice in their head, a voice which is both character and plot device, a voice whose mysterious intentions are key to the story but unspool slowly over time. Both use detailed, often visceral descriptions of physical acts to ground a world full of complex terminology that is rarely explained to the reader. And both are concerned with hard, world-remaking decisions that force their protagonists to question the principles that have become as ingrained in them as the other mind that's grafted to them. For the most part, this parallel is high praise--Ninefox Gambit remains one of my favorite books of the last decade, and I enjoy being dropped into a world that I have to figure out mostly through the characters' eyes rather than through infodumps. However, The Archive Undying sometimes lacks the aesthetic appeal of Ninefox Gambit's imagery. The choice to shift points of view and include several second-person sections, while part of the book's ultimate payoff, does make the early sections slower going. Still, I found the book to be rewarding and full of creative detail, and look forward to any potential sequels.

Sunai, the main protagonist (and Kel Cheris analogue, for those Ninefox Gambit fans out there) grew up serving the AI god Iterate Fractal, a god that proved to be both more and less mortal than its followers expected. (Sidenote: many of the AI names in this book--also Reconcile Elegy, Register Parse, Acrimony Covenant--remind me of the moth names in Ninefox Gambit; they have a bit of that same mathematical flavor.) On the one hand, Iterate Fractal fell victim to the same mysterious corruption as most other AIs, killing most of its followers and destroying large parts of its city-state in a slightly-horrifying-to-read-about explosion of white roots. On the other hand, despite longstanding belief that something about Iterate Fractal prevented its resurrection as a human-piloted mecha robot called an ENGINE, it appears that an Iterate Fractal ENGINE has in fact been developed. Sunai's journey begins without a clear purpose--ever since the collapse of his former life, he's been on the run, hiding his true nature as a "relic" with some fragment of the AI's power. This meandering early section of the book suffers slightly from the lack of a clear direction and the absence of clear imagery to help the reader stay grounded. Without having established the signature traits of Sunai, his lover and potential betrayer Vayadi, or the relevant AIs, the story is sometimes bogged down in hard-to-follow conversations and internal monologues. As more details of the world emerge (and I let go of the need to understand every scrap of personal history the characters were obliquely referencing) the book became easier to follow. By the time Sunai and Vayadi are headed to Iterate Fractal's former home of Khuon Mo, I was fully engrossed.

One particular aspect of the story merits special attention for helped to elevate it from a fun but relatively standard mecha story to something more complex with a richer texture. At various points in the story, Sunai cites and describes quasi-religious short texts (I imagine them being somewhat equivalent to psalms or Bible excerpts) called Leaves. Each Leaf, usually numbered, tells a short story about an Emanation of God (a Buddha-like figure, in my reading) and is interpreted in various ways by its readers--be they humans or AIs. I often find the excerpted fictional texts within books to be more interesting than the main plot, and especially in the early sections here the Leaves kept me interested in the world when Sunai himself was doing a less-than-satisfactory job. By keeping them brief, the author does a good job of not disrupting the flow of the story. Including the exegeses by various human and AI characters cast the audience in the role of interpreter as well, giving us the opportunity to draw our own conclusions about both the text itself and its in-universe readers.

Four and a half stars. A complex puzzle that would likely benefit from, and reward, a less plot-focused re-reading.