These Prisoning Hills, Christopher Rowe
I’m going to just admit it: I didn’t really get this one. There’s a history and a world built up here that I feel I only half-understood, from the politics to the geography to the relationships between people and things. There’s a lot of atmosphere to it, and I found it intriguing, but at the same time the narrative jumps around so much — and often without a logical link between the jumps — that I just… didn’t follow.
I feel like I missed something, some vital context that would make it all make a lot more sense. I grasped some of the basic stuff (Athena Parthenus is a massive AI that tried to take over the world and involved controlling people somehow; there’s heavy body modification in the opposing side as well), but… I couldn’t fit it all together, and figure out the characters’ place in it. I wonder if there are short stories in this world or something? Or a previous book?
Anyway, I can’t personally recommend it, though I see that others enjoyed it a lot. Whatever the key to it is, I missed it.
Might try searching for old cached versions of The Voluntary State by this author, as I believe that was the first in this series. There’s a followup story in the collection Telling the Map, too, though I haven’t read it. Don’t know of they will help explain this book, but I found TVS to be mostly comprehensible.
Interesting! I did like another of Rowe’s books, so maybe that’s worth a try. Thanks for the hint!