The back cover blurb goes something along the lines of "What if the most advanced AI wanted you dead?" It's an intriguing idea, and it gets you all of 50 pages into the book. This is not a slow burn.

This book is a whirlwind as you follow Adrian (yes, Jon Evans makes a Rocky joke) through enough twists and turns to fill five novels and eventually stretches credibility until it almost snaps. At some points I found myself wanting the book to go in a bit more depth; at others I wanted it to skip ahead. Overall, Exadelic is a good, solid read but it isn't going to end up on my top ten list.

A few things that I particularly enjoyed:

  • It is a bit of a trope for Sci Fi to ret-con myths and legends to fit them into their narrative and give a bit more grounding to the narrative. Take, for example, Blindsight incorporating vampires. Exadelic does this particularly well.
  • Jon Evans is a software engineer, and it shows. The coding and technology aspects induced absolutely no eye rolls, and I very much enjoyed the use of git branches as a metaphor for multiple worlds.
  • Déjà vu is represented on a few occasions by repeating blocks of text, and it works really well. I don't want to spoil the part, but one such déjà vu episode felt like a gut punch. The setup, including groundwork laid chapters in advance, was perfect.