When an AI dies, its city dies with it…
We’re thrilled to reveal the cover of The Archive Undying, the first volume of Emma Mieko Candon’s Downworld Sequence, a sci-fi series where AI deities and brutal police states clash, wielding giant robots steered by pilot-priests with corrupted bodies. Coming June 27, 2023 from Tordotcom Publishing.
From the author:
“The machines in The Archive Undying are behemoths because anything lesser would be morally decrepit. So whenever I look at this cover and I feel like that big, beautiful robot is going to eat me alive (even without a mouth! I am afraid to learn how that would work!), I’m terrified, but I’m also ecstatic, because it’s perfect. I can’t wait for readers to meet the rest of the feral mechs—as well as the people trying desperately not to be devoured by them”
“Giant robots stomp around a lush and tactile world of ruined cities and unknowable AI gods, which is all one could ever need.” —New York Times bestselling author Tamsyn Muir
Giant robots and AI gods run amok in The Archive Undying, national bestseller Emma Mieko Candon’s bold entry into the world of mecha fiction.
WHEN AN AI DIES, ITS CITY DIES WITH IT
WHEN A CITY FALLS, IT LEAVES A CORPSE BEHIND
WHEN THAT CORPSE RUNS OFF, ONLY DEVOTION CAN BRING IT BACKWhen the robotic god of Khuon Mo went mad, it destroyed everything it touched. It killed its priests, its city, and all its wondrous works. But in its final death throes, the god brought one thing back to life: its favorite child, Sunai. For the seventeen years since then, Sunai has walked the land like a ghost, unable to die, unable to age, and unable to forget the horrors he’s seen. He’s run as far as he can from the wreckage of his faith, drowning himself in drink, drugs, and men. But when Sunai wakes up in the bed of the one man he never should have slept with, he finds himself on a path straight back into the world of gods and machines.
The Archive Undying is the first volume of Emma Mieko Candon’s Downworld Sequence, a sci-fi series where AI deities and brutal police states clash, wielding giant robots steered by pilot-priests with corrupted bodies.
Come get in the robot.
Buy the Book
The Archive Undying
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Emma Mieko Candon is a bestselling queer author who writes about devouring ghosts, cursed linguistics, and mediocre robots. Her previous novel, Star Wars Visions: Ronin, reimagined the Star Wars mythos through a Japanese lens. Editor by day, escaped academic by night, she is at all hours beholden to the whims of two lopsided cats and grateful for the support of an enviably handsome wife.
