Starred review from July 17, 2023
Evans (Invisible Armies) returns with a mind-bending and breakneck novel about artificial intelligence gone wrong. After Adrian, a middle-aged, mid-ranking executive at a Silicon Valley tech company, wakes up to a SWAT team banging down his door with a battering ram, his life changes. Coherence, a hyperintelligent, fully autonomous AI built by an old peer from college, has identified Adrian as the number one threat to its existence, forcing Adrian on the run from a shadowy government agency that believes he possesses superhuman capabilities. Leaving mundane life with his fiancée and her daughters, Adrian embarks on an increasingly high-stakes flight that takes him back in time and through multiple alternate dimensions, bringing him face-to-face with the superintelligence that controls the universe. Evans does a brilliant job at taking the contemporary moment as his jumping-off point and then turning it inside out to create a unique new reality. The scope of the narrative continually expands, and with each wild new scene, time period, dimension, and big idea, readers will be wowed anew. Tech nerds in particular will gobble up this futuristic dystopia. Deborah Schneider/Gelfman Schneider Literary Agents.