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STARRED Book Review: Glitches of Gods

By IndieBookView on July 17, 2024

Glitches of Gods

by Jurgen "Jojo" Appelo

Genre: Science Fiction & Fantasy

ISBN: 9789083423616

Print Length: 524 pages

Reviewed by Andrea Marks-Joseph

AI-engineer (and our protagonist) Julien is best described by his colleagues as a difficult but brilliant coworker. He may have "helped create a near-sentient AI[, but] the thing went rogue, got some people killed, pissed a few others off, and stirred up quite some trouble. It was the most thrilling episode in our corporate history. The company decommissioned the AI, and Julien's been working under the radar ever since." That all sounds fair, and any reasonable person would think that Julien certainly deserves a break to decompress, but that's not quite how it's going.

The company is now pressuring Julien to help build a better version of the AI entity, correcting mistakes they haven't quite identified yet—with an urgent, corporate-led timeline to meet a deadline of attending an industry expo. Oh, and there's also the small detail of Julien running "the annoying, people-killing virtual assistant he was not supposed to have" as his personal AI system at home.

Julien and Orec (the AI) have an entertaining, intimate, familial relationship. Their shared history and sense of humor is immediately apparent. On top of all that, Julien suddenly finds himself thrust into new near-realities, where there are slight changes to his real life. Not only is it happening unexpectedly, but it's happening repeatedly, and so each time he must re-investigate his reality—often reliving traumatic events.