Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the audio ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review.
Okay, so, this book was not AT ALL what I was expecting going in, based on the blurb. If you are expecting emotional good times and characters to identify with ala Murderbot, stop expecting that.
Our main character, Uncharles, goes on a sort of picaresque philosophical journey of What Does It Mean to Be Alive, with each section of the book being an ode/homage to a different classic (usually sff) author: Agatha Christie, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Luis Borges, and Dante Alighieri. Each section of the book has a different feel, and I liked some a lot more than others. The first section, Christie (spelled KR15-T, bc robots) plays like a farce, as our main character murders his master but has no memory of it, and his programming and that of the other robots turns the whole situation into one of ridiculous proportions as they attempt to follow commands that make no sense.
Oh, and by the way, this is a world in which humans are vanishingly rare, as they seem to have turned over all their thinking, duties, and tasks to robots, and then as far as I can tell, disappeared.
All in all, Adrian Tchaikovsky continues to be weird and creative and I will continue reading his strange books as long as he keeps writing them, but I do prefer to have an emotional attachment to the characters I’m reading about, and because Uncharles is not yet a Real Boy for most of this novel, I had a really hard time with that and kept wanting to be reading something else.
Note: The audiobook is read by the author, and his voice is bAnAnAs. He does such a great job, he should just narrate all of his audiobooks from now on.
[3.5 stars]