Reviews with content warning for Body horror - The Archive Undying

This book doesnt pull its punches, and doesnt spoonfeed you worldbuilding. Its more about the trauma and the grief than robot fights. Whether this trauma is generational, interpersonal, or divinely wrought, all of it is done so well and believeablly. It speaks to the quality of writting as a whole as amazing. Id watching this movie, tv series, anything. I need more.

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royalraspberry's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring reflective relaxing tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I'd love to give this book even more stars - one of the best books I've read in years. The prose is absolutely enchanting, and the world building is phenomenal, this sits up there with Leckie and Wells with the greats of the current scifi era. The characters are memorable and instantly likeable (mostly), the story line is intriguing, and I am absolutely OBSESSED with the world buidling - an entire civilization built on the wreckage of corrupt, fallen AI gods. I got this through a library loan and it's one I'll buy so I can read it over and over again.

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booksthatburn's review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

THE ARCHIVE UNDYING by Emma Mieko Candon hits my brain like an achillean version of THE TIGER FLU by Larissa Lai or THE ALL-CONSUMING WORLD by Cassandra Khaw, combining viscera and technology to create liminal immortality in an ongoing negotiation, tenuous and vital.

I love stories with worldbuilding that is immersive, not waiting for the reader to catch up, but just letting the story unfold; only explaining things that someone in the world would need stated, more explicitly. THE ARCHIVE UNDYING provides explanations late, intertwined with regret.

As I’ve said before and will doubtless say again, I specifically love books which include mental transformations of nominally the same character, such that they understand some thing very differently than they did before, or have an entirely new state of mind. My particular favorite is when they are so different as to be a discrete person by the time the changes are done. THE ARCHIVE UNDYING is full of this, first with a narrator whose identity takes a long time to be known, and then with of variety of technologically assisted mental connections and transformative clashes of mind, such that even if everyone nominally remains afterward as entities, they are changed by those meetings.

Reading this is an audiobook definitely helped to let the story roll over me, enjoying the flow of the words even if I didn’t always understand why something was happening. A few pretty significant changes happen towards the end which reframe and contextualize the actions of some secondary characters. It’s the kind of book where I know I will reread it, if only to experience the shift in perspective that comes with knowing characters, backstories, and ulterior motives from the start.

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jayisreading's review

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adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced

3.0

I really wanted to like this one more than I did. I really liked the characters, the premise was fascinating, and it had other elements that made me think, "Wow, this might be one of my favorite books this year." Unfortunately, I found the execution rather messy, especially towards the end when too many perspectives started coming into play.

I understand authors who just want to tell the story and leave it up to the reader to figure things out themself, but I felt that Candon needed to give the reader a little more to work with. I found that I was confused more often than I would have liked. I stuck with it, though, because I was really drawn to the world (at least what I was able to make sense of it) and the characters. The characters were wonderfully complex in all their flaws, and I especially loved the disability representation.

But to return to my issues, I found that I was mostly frustrated while reading this book, which isn't exactly the mood you want to be in. When certain ideas were introduced, I wanted to learn more about them, but Candon often moved on and left me hanging. I felt that I was given a lot of fragments but they didn't quite fit together to create a full picture. Maybe I wasn't as engaged as I should have been (even though I'd say I was in my attempt to follow what's happening), but things didn't pan out the way I hoped.

This book might work better as a reread, so I might give this one another try in the future, especially if it turns out this book is part of a series.

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venti's review against another edition

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challenging mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

confusing

i had really high hopes for this and the first chapter was banger, but i really struggled to tell what the fuck was going on at some points lol. there were little gotcha moments that felt like they were supposed to be important to the progression of the plot that fell flat because i had no context for the relevance/impact of the moment — because i had no idea what was going on lmao!!

some of my favourite media is intentionally confusing/surrealist (children of the sea, evangelion,) but this fell flat in the sense that it didn’t have a decent basis for the surrealism to occur. evangelion (which is actually one of the flagship comparisons for this book in marketing i’ve seen along nier automata) works because we have the first twenty odd episodes, all with at least some coherency. sure, there are surrealist moments — but at the end of the day the characters are still human and the narrative exists in a realm we can understand, and with the codifying trope that is the mecha genre. you would think the archive undying follows suit in this case — considering there are mechs — but honestly i couldn’t tell you what a single mech or ENGINE looked like after reading this book. maybe i’m just stupid, but this just didn’t work for me! it’s really a shame too, because i can tell that candon really felt passionate for this world and it’s just such a shame i couldn’t get it 😭😭😭

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devynreadsnovels's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

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wynwicket's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

I don't know how to review this one -- it went from confusing to glorious to devastating to sharply humorous -- and sometimes all four at the same time. I'm still not entirely sure what happened in the last 100 pages but, my goodness, it Happened. I'll have to read it again to make everything make sense, but it's a story worth taking the time to understand.

It's a story about giant robots inhabited by dying sociopathic AIs who used to be cities. It's a story about Sunai, a human disaster, who makes bad decisions for the right reasons, and Veyadi, the scientist he loves, who is something of a disaster himself. It's a story about bodily autonomy and identity and battles with cyber-creatures. It's weird and complex and utterly befuddling, but very cool.

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kalchainein's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.5

When I cracked open The Archive Undying, I read the first chapter and then said to my wife, “I bet you anything this person’s written fanfic.”

Dear reader, I was correct.

According to Candon’s Tumblr, The Archive Undying in fact has its roots in a Pacific Rim AU. I am not, in and of itself, opposed to the filing off of serial numbers. And this isn’t even really a case of that: the storylines and characters are far removed from much that could be considered Pacific Rim-ish, other than the big ol’ robots and a neurotic scientist-type.

No, my issue with TAU’s fanfiction roots are that it, like fanfiction, is built on a scaffolding of prior knowledge that the reader is presumed to have. Unfortunately, unlike with fanfic, the new reader of TAU has none of that background information, so tromping through its multitude of locales and terminology ends up leaving one with a sense that they SHOULD know some specific tidbit of canon in order to figure out what the hell is going on, but no way to access it. Some people like this, or at least don’t mind it. Me, not so much.

TAU’s characters also suffer because of this assumed familiarity: you get a gist of character archetypes and relationships, but at a remove, and without ever fully getting to know them as anything beyond diverse moving pieces skittering across an admittedly fascinating landscape.

One could argue that books that reveal themselves fully only after a reread are more rewarding, but if one finds the book a slog the first time because of its indecipherability, how inspired to reread are they going to be?

Also, perhaps a petty complaint, but there were far less giant mecha than I was led to believe. Despite the Evangelion joke in the summary, there was very little of ~~Shinji~~ Sunai getting in the actual robot.

Bomb-ass writing though. Lovely stuff.

Unfortunately, pretty words can only carry you so far. Two-point-five slightly disappointed stars.

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