Publishers Weekly
★ 07/17/2023
Evans (Invisible Armies) returns with a mind-bending and breakneck novel about artificial intelligence gone wrong. After Adrian, a middle-aged, mid-ranking executive at a Silicon Valley tech company, wakes up to a SWAT team banging down his door with a battering ram, his life changes. Coherence, a hyperintelligent, fully autonomous AI built by an old peer from college, has identified Adrian as the number one threat to its existence, forcing Adrian on the run from a shadowy government agency that believes he possesses superhuman capabilities. Leaving mundane life with his fiancée and her daughters, Adrian embarks on an increasingly high-stakes flight that takes him back in time and through multiple alternate dimensions, bringing him face-to-face with the superintelligence that controls the universe. Evans does a brilliant job at taking the contemporary moment as his jumping-off point and then turning it inside out to create a unique new reality. The scope of the narrative continually expands, and with each wild new scene, time period, dimension, and big idea, readers will be wowed anew. Tech nerds in particular will gobble up this futuristic dystopia. Deborah Schneider/Gelfman Schneider Literary Agents. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
Mind-bending and breakneck…Evans does a brilliant job at taking the present day as his jumping-off point and then turning it inside out to create a unique new reality…with each wild new scene, time period, dimension, and big idea, readers will be wowed anew.” - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“With the creative dexterity of Charles Stross and the history-bending agility of Neal Stephenson, Evans’ roller-coaster sf debut evokes the spirit of Philip K. Dick and keeps readers guessing to the very end.” - Booklist (starred review)
“Mind-blowing… this off-the-rails, generously overstuffed, continuously surprising tale is what you might have gotten if Greg Egan had written The Illuminatus! Trilogy… on a deeper level the book is a consideration of how one should or could live one’s life ethically… beyond the super-science cosmic shenanigans lies a humanist heart.” - Locus
“Truly great . . . You think you know what Exadelic is doing and then the scope goes out and out and out. I really felt I had to send out for a new barrel of ‘wows.’ [It] starts with a group of techie friends in San Francisco and a potentially real AI. From there it just gets wilder and wilder, in ways I don’t want to spoil but which you can’t imagine. It has perfect edge-of-seat pacing, and it all makes sense in the end. I expect this to be one of the big books of the year, the kind everyone will be talking about.” - Jo Walton, award-winning author of Among Others
“A gripping, wildly ambitious page-turner of the impossible meeting the inevitable, a startup unlocking the secrets of the universe the hard way, a prosaic protagonist picked to pay the price, and the humanity of it all with friends made and lost along his kaleidoscopic tour … Fresh, cool and provocative!” - Josh Wolfe, founder and managing partner of Lux Capital
“Jon has the unique ability to write about artificial intelligence, innovation, Silicon Valley, the military and science fiction in a way that leaves you unable to put this book down, both highly readable and excessively weird. A fun, fun, thought-expanding read.” - Andy Weissman, managing partner of Union Square Ventures
“There are going to be hundreds of AGI fiction books coming out … Exadelic very quickly goes off the standard script in some fun ways!” - John Carmack, creator of Doom and Quake, former CTO of Oculus, founder of Keen AGI
"Jon Evans seems to spend most of his time backpacking in places (Zimbabwe, the Balkans, Iraq) that even the most intrepid of us tend to avoid. Evans also finds time to write strong, politically motivated thrillers." — Chicago Tribune
"Thought-provoking ... Mr Evans shows great potential." — The Economist
Library Journal
07/01/2023
Adrian Ross finds himself dragged out of his home one morning by the police and propelled into the center of a rapidly unfolding adventure that plays out across time and space. Adrian's journey begins with a military-industrial complex conspiracy and its advanced artificial intelligence trained on esoteric magic, but it escalates as he wanders into his own past to unravel the secrets behind the AI's early development, unwittingly unlocking the secrets of the universe. Evans (Swarm) brings his techno-thriller experience to the emerging sci-fi subgenre centering on AI and machine learning. While Evans seeks to deliver an action-packed thriller, the pacing leaves little time for reflection on Adrian's odyssey and is complicated by a large and, at times, confusing cast of characters. VERDICT Blending trending topics in emergent AI technologies and occult mysticism make for an intriguing premise, but Evans ultimately struggles to balance exposition and plot.—Lydia Fletcher
