Exadelic

July 1, 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

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Starred review from July 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.

Starred review from August 1, 2023
Adrian Ross isn't particularly special--he's a middle manager with some keen programming skills--but he has partied with plenty of movers and shakers in Silicon Valley. When he is broken out of jail after being framed for having child porn, these friends are all he can turn to. But who can he trust? His friend Meredith has launched an AI superintelligence that points to him as a major threat to its existence. Just as Adrian thinks he has an understanding of what is going on--which involves not only multiple universes but magical artifacts and bizarre rites--he is thrown back into the past to effect some kind of change in the future. From there, he pinballs farther into the past, where he meets Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard (with a brief glimpse of Robert Heinlein), to a future where an AI has caused a civil war, and Barack Obama has to surrender. Next stop, the perfection of the humanity program within a Dyson Sphere. 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.

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