This book has all the elements of a good Sci-Fi story. It discusses the rise of Artificial Intelligence, which is topical these days. It has a detailed future setting with a realistic social order. It has a reasonable amount of hi-tech gadgetry. It has sympathetic and admirable characters we can empathize with. It has a plausible outside threat to bring all of humanity together, and a theme nobody can argue against.

However…

This author breaks one of the hard-and-fast rules of storytelling. He does not consider the experience of those who read the book. All his focus is on the message he wants to produce, and he ignores how the readers are receiving it. As a result, the story lacks consistent flow that we can follow, bouncing around from setting to setting, character to character, without sufficient transition to let the reader know what is going on.

Frequently the timeline gets twisted, the  worst example being the end of Chapter 39, which jumps back to events from the middle of Chapter 38.

The plotline meanders, interspersed with long discussions, such as a 13-page philosophical treatise on love of all kinds, performed by an AI whose original function had once been occupational profiling, and which has not been mentioned in the story for 175 pages. Then, when the conflict is over, the author thinks we need another 16 pages of dense prose explaining the nature of love all over again. If the story hasn’t demonstrated the theme by this point, no amount of author explanation is going to do the job.

This situation is not helped by the large cast, with numerous groups of similar young people, each with little individual personality to distinguish one from the others.

To sum up, this novel consists of a lot of good ideas that need an editor.

Three stars.