The Archive Undying is the first in a new SciFi trilogy by author Emma Mieko Candon. Candon was the writer of the tie-in novel Star Wars Visions: Ronin, which expounded upon an anime Star Wars short that was produced by a Japanese Animation studio and did so in a way that was really really good. That novel took what was a short that did not need any further expansion and made it its own story with its own tremendous characters and themes and really got me excited for seeing Candon's future work. And so here we have The Archive Undying, a book described as dealing with "war machines and AI gods run amok" by its marketing campaign and wow was I excited to get my hands on this one.
That said, while the Archive Undying does have giant mecha, war machines, and AI gods gone mad, the story is a lot more human and personal. The story focuses on a protagonist named Sunai who was raised seemingly to die by the AI god who ruled his city...and who in the process of dying transformed Sunai into a man who cannot die or even age. And the story focuses upon Sunai as he deals with his past with that AI god, as well as two friends he has met in the years since who also have ties to that god, and most significantly with his attraction to and sudden relationship with an engineer Veyadi who may be involved with that god's unholy resurrection by a foreign superpower. The story is incredibly chaotic and kind of confusing, as its perspective changes frequently, with the book using first, second, and third person narratives at various points, and honestly after reading it I kind of still wonder what exactly I read. And yet in some ways it works as it showcases how Sunai and Veyadi struggle with their pasts, their self-worths, and what it means for them to possible have a future in some body or another.
I will try to explain....poorly....after the jump:
Plot Summary:
The City-States of the World used to all be ruled by powerful autonomous intelligences (AIs). And then something happened to them, "corrupting" them (or really killing them), causing mass destruction in their cities, for their followers...but for a few archivists who were in close contact with those AIs at the time of their corruption, who are instead transformed into human "Relics" with various conditions and powers. And most notably, Relics can be thrown back into the corpse of their former AI masters to become the powerful, but controllable, deadly weapons known as ENGINEs.
17 years ago, the AI Iterate Fractal, god of Khuon Mo, corrupted and transformed Sunai into a relic...one who can seemingly always heal and who can never die. Sunai has spent the last 17 years running and hiding who he is, linking up with a few others he learns to love who also try to help the remnants of Khuon Mo, whenever he isn't diving headfirst into drink or sex. But when Sunai gets a message from someone who shouldn't have been able to find him, he gets blackout drunk and wakes up in the worst possible place: in the bed and ship belonging to the autonomist Veyadi Lut, a man with the knowledge of how relics and ENGINEs work and a certain curiosity with Iterate Fractal and its leavings...like Sunai himself. And when this connection with Veyadi leads him to an archive hidden to everyone except himself, it leads Sunai back to Khuon Mo and back to the secrets of his past...secrets that could result in harm to the few friends and loved ones he's made over the last 17 years if he keeps messing up impulsively.....
The Archive Undying starts with a plot that seems to be going in a very different direction than it actually goes. You have the AI setup I outlined above sure, but you also have at least one Imperial Power out there, the Harbor, who uses relics to form ENGINEs which it uses to take dictatorial control of the former cities of AIs. And so in the beginning, it looks like a large focus of this plot is going to be on Empire and totalitarian control, as Sunai has to hide himself from the Harbor and try to help his friends find a way to prevent the Harbor from making an ENGINE out of Iterate Fractal and taking full control of their birthplace city.
And that's certainly an undercurrent of what drives the plot for much of the book, but we don't really go into Empire and conflicts of power so much in the end, with the book instead very much diving into Sunai and Veyadi's (as well as others) struggles to be selfish and to value their own selves, especially Sunai who always tries to do things for others and keeps getting into trouble because of it - because Sunai never thinks that his own self is worth something compared to others. Sunai is an utter mess, reminding me in a way of a very different character from another book - Touraine from the Unbroken - in how, like Touraine, Sunai finds himself seesawing between different choices and character alliances: he'll go from wanting to run from those who know where he is to being onboard to return to Khuon Mo he'll go from wanting to stay desperately away from [redacted] to wanting to kill [redacted] himself to wanting to save [redacted], and these topsy turvy character turns all make sense in the moment even as they're incredibly disorienting and crazy. It doesn't help that other characters, whose intentions the book plays far closer to the vest, also seem to make such topsy turvy and twisty plot choices, which can leave the reader - and did me - kind of confused.
The result is less an action filled - although there are some mecha battles - or conspiracy thriller or empire-examining novel and more a personal novel dealing with personal choices made by peoples with tremendous guilts in their past that make it hard for them to really feel comfortable with their own self-worth and make them take terribly stupid and reckless actions that could easily harm the people they love. And for Sunai, that isn't helped by the fact that he finds himself frequently falling in stupid love with people, most recently with Veyadi, a person who he knows is dangerous to him especially, but whom he just can't quit and wants to desperately help survive. Sunai - and Veyadi, and others in this book - needs to learn through all the chaos that his own life is worth something, and that he and the ones he loves can each deserve to live and find something together...and that neither running away nor destroying things is the way to go forward.
Again, this is a very confusing book, and honestly I came out from the ending thinking in part like "wow that was good" and also "wait, what did I just read and what just happened"? The changing of voices and narrators amounts to a very confusing story, as we see the world through multiple perspectives but not in ways that always enlighten us as to people's motives and actions, which make the themes of this book sometimes - well usually - hard to parse. But it is interesting and good enough in its characters to recommend, and I'll be back for the sequel too to see how that turns out.
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