A review by thereadingrambler
Colossus by Ryan Leslie

dark emotional sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

One Sentence Review: Leslie adroitly explores complicated questions of identity, God, and love within a tightly plotted novel that doesn’t shy away from asking impossible questions that will never have final answers.

When I was teaching at a large state university, I designed a Nature Writing course. The course was divided into four units that focused on different kinds of writing about nature, and each was connected with a different kind of relationship humanity has with nature (including a unit on what nature even is). One of the units was on nature and technology, i.e., how technology mediates nature to us, from very simple technologies like trail markers to more complex things like virtual reality. During one of our classes, we started talking about AI (which at that point was more theoretical than the ChatGPT et al. we are familiar with in 2024), and I posed the question to them if God is an AI, trying to push them to think more abstractly, critically, and creatively. For students who wanted to explore that question more, I would’ve recommended this book if it had been available, for that’s (one of) the core question(s) of the book. 

The back of this book does not even begin to capture the true spirit of this book. Yes, this book is about Clay, the ramifications of the drug Dying Wish on the world, and the complexity of memory and identity, but the plot of this book (while gripping, especially the third act) serves to confront the reader with some of the most difficult questions of our present moment. My copy of the book is marked up with notes and underlines because I found my mind going a mile a minute trying to keep up with each new element. As some might know, I’m very taken with discussions of religion in science fiction. So many science fiction novels seem to assume religion has just died out in the future, as if humanity has “evolved” beyond the need for faith. But I strongly doubt this will be true. In fact, I think the opposite will be true. The more we supposedly “know” about the universe, the more we “reveal” the mysteries of space and time the more we will rely on religion for comfort and security in the face of the increasingly knowable. The infinite is incomprehensible, and the more humans attempt to understand it, the more fully we will grasp the incomprehensibility. For me, that was the most interesting exploration in this book. Being vague to avoid spoilers, humanity develops the ability to communicate with parallel universes (on the theory that every decision spawns a parallel universe where a different decision was made), and this ability is both incredible and overwhelming for the human mind—but not for the AI minds who are seeking singularity across all the universes. 

Underneath all of the theoretical physics, insane philosophy, and murderous AIs, the core of this novel is one man’s love for a woman. The book centers on Clay and Karla and Clay’s quest to find his way back to the woman he loves, crossing as many universes as necessary to do that. I did think that having their relationship not only be an age gap romance but also between a professor and student was unnecessary and didn’t really add anything to the plot in any meaningful way. There were plenty of other ways for Clay to lose everything without having unethical goings-on. 

There were some inconsistencies in the book that should’ve been caught during line editing, but I know that for these small presses, there’s a lot of unpaid work being done by only a handful of people. There were also some printing errors, which isn’t the fault of the press at all but was annoying. My biggest criticism is definitely with the relationship dynamics. There were a couple of small plot holes, but nothing that I found too distracting from the main force of the book. 

My comps for this book are Prophet by Sin Blaché and Helen Macdonald and This is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar. Colossus has the same complicated mix of romance, thriller, lit fic, and sf that Prophet does, and it shares the romance against all odds in a mind-bending setting with This is How You Lose The Time War. If you’re looking for something that is philosophical, confusing in the best possible way, grounded by the relationship between two people, I would highly recommend Colossus (and those other two books).
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