I read this and honestly don’t remember a thing about the characters, the plot, or the story in general. Granted, I’m writing the review over four years after finishing it, but I remember a lot of the books I read. And any good sci-fi I read at least twice. I do recall that I wasn’t blown away and was hesitant to pick up the final book in the series. This gets a big fat “meh” from me.
The premise here is awesome: a computer virus that goes sentient and grows so fast that it spawns entire ecosystems that fracture and fight each other. This was my favorite of the series, by far. My only wish was that it was longer and developed the characters further, including the AIs. There was so much here worth exploring and digging into that I almost wish Neal Stephenson wrote this book.
The premise of the book—and keep in mind it was published in 2012—is that someone within a company that very much resembles Google, creates an AI to predict what you want to say in an email. That AI becomes sentient and off we go. As such, I was quite amused when Gmail first introduced its predictive responses. If you’re looking for a short sci-fi book that might get you thinking about implications of “runaway AI” then Avogadro Corp and the subsequent books might be the way to go. I wasn’t blown away by them though.