Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

This is a great fun spacey read.
Following aliens, tech and looking at what it means to be human.
This was a brilliant journey of a book and brilliant sci fi read.

**I was provided with an eARC through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review**

Sadly on returning to give this book a second chance a year after I first picked it up, I am again having to put it down.

Though the concept of The Last Human is intriguing - humanity being the most dangerous and feared species across the galaxies, a human girl believed to be the last of her kind being thrown into a journey to uncover the truth behind it all - I just couldn’t get into it.

The writing and the characters just weren’t engaging me enough and I got bored quite quickly. I did love parts of the world building though! The ideas behind the Network, a technological system that efficiently connects all species, ridding the universe of communication and intellectual barriers, was really cool!

But on the whole I don' think this book is for me.
DNFed at 29%

I do like a sci-fi book but I couldn't get started on this one. I found the opening chapter didn't engage me and I couldn't bring myself to finish. I feel bad that I can't give a better review but this book just wasn't for me. I hope that others don't feel the same and the author enjoys success.

The Last Human takes place in the far future, where a super-intelligence known as the Network connects all living things – both organic and robotic – together in an augmented reality. Intellect is a valued commodity in this universe and inhabitants are graded into tiers, with sub-legal intelligences reduced to menial tasks such as sanitation stations. With each new tier, that species attains a level of understanding almost incomprehensible to previous tiers – with hive-minds and seemingly god-like intelligences occupying those higher levels. The book itself is grouped into chapters and tiers, and the direction of the story becomes more dense and conceptual as readers progress through these tiers, reflecting the lead character’s journey as she gains greater understanding and awareness of the world around her. I must admit that I did struggle with the scale of the novel as events expanded beyond traditional boundaries of reality and into the metaphysical.

As a debut novel, The Last Human is extremely self-assured and Zack Jordan does a great job at world-building, establishing the Network through exposition and ‘user-guides’ inserted between chapters. The idea of augmented reality implants that incorporates text chat, emoticons and ‘helper intelligences’ into our daily life doesn’t seem too far-fetched and I think we are definitely heading in that direction in the next few decades. Jordan succeeds in making his last human, Sarya the Daughter, into a likeable protagonist for audiences to identify with, and she anchors some of the more abstract concepts with her emotional weight. I really enjoyed the set-up of the last human in existence raised in secret by an alien arachnid, and I was surprised that Jordan didn’t spend more time with that status-quo before literally blowing things up. In fact, The Last Human frequently subverts expectations and propels its lead character into a variety of situations – the events of the novel could easily have been paced out over a few books. It felt like Jordan had lots of really innovative ideas and I would have loved to have seen some of them given more air to breathe.

My favourite aspect of the novel was the relationship between Sarya and her adoptive mother, Shenya the Widow, and while it felt cut short after the first act of the novel – it did get readdressed later on through flashbacks. Part of me was hoping for some resolution to this story-arc and it would have been satisfying for Sarya to confront her adoptive mother once she found out the truth about her origins. It often felt like the central plot involving the Network and the Observer – two high-tier intelligences locked in battle – interrupted the natural flow of the novel and so characters like Mer, Sandy and Roche seemed under-developed, which is a shame as they were ripe with potential. Again, it felt like Jordan was subverting the traditional format of a rag-tag team of oddities coming together to embark on a quest by instead having the characters be pawns of a greater game. The novel certainly did feel like it transitioned to a different plane of existence with each new tier, sweeping pieces off of the game board and restacking them in new positions to continue the story. While it did result in a fresh and exciting pace, it left me thinking that some of the supporting characters were not given enough prominence.

The Last Human is a very clever book, and Zack Jordan does his best to balance the scale between the micro and the macro, focusing on character development alongside galaxy-altering cataclysmic events. Much like how Sarya felt overwhelmed by the scale of the Blackstar station, I found myself equally as overwhelmed when the story begun to question the rules of reality. While I might not have always been on the same page as Jordan, I understood the general concepts introduced and how the cast of characters had been manipulated by the higher-tier intelligences. I loved how this book continually blind-sided me, and the shifting sands of morality resulted in difficulty determining who the villain of the piece was. As a debut novel, The Last Human stands out for its amazing world-building and complex narrative that rewards perseverance to deliver a simply mind-bending odyssey through space.

Sarya the Daughter is the last human in the galaxy. Hidden by her adopted mother, Shenya the widow, Sanya has had to deny her species throughout her life to stay safe. That is until one day she is recognised by the Outsider.
I struggled with the Last Human. Every time things became interesting or the tension was being ramped up, Zack Jordan would break away to provide details of the Network which connects the majority species within the known universe. As this happened I became less interested in the story to a point where I almost give up. In an attempt to convey the vastness of the interconnected universe, Jordan used the word millions as a way of explaining this. Millions of people on a gantry, millions of years to describe the Network's existence, millions of eyes staring at Satya and millions of ships can be seen out of the ship's window. There is a drinking game hidden in this book.
I admire Zack Jordan's attempt to create a vastness and occasional philosophical sci-fi novel in the same way as Peter Hamilton's stunning Night's Dawn trilogy, but I felt the story was lost halfway through.

Totally unexpected! A roller-coaster of a read centred around Sarya, the last Human who is being raised by a Widow. A space opera with a difference, this really did make my brain hurt a little bit. Overall I loved the vast scope of this, even the bit that hurt. Fascinating characters and motivations, a brilliant read.

This book is bonkers. And that's a compliment by the way! I do love me a good bonkers book, and I find that the sci-fi genre lends itself very nicely as a basis to one!
Sarya is a human in a galaxy that has rid itself of that particular race for reasons that are eventually explained later on in the book, so I won't go into that here. She's masquerading as an accepted being and, when we first meet her, she is living as the adopted daughter of a widow. How this came about, we find out later too. Long story short and spoiler free, she is outed and flees her home, teams up with an eclectic mix of side kicks and starts to piece together the reasons her race is hated, where she came from, and basically what she needs to do to survive. More than that I can't really divulge here as it's all a bit convoluted and interconnected and it's all best discovered as the author intended.
I've already mentioned how bonkers the book is, and that it's bonkers in all the right ways, but it's also extremely well plotted and executed to actually being plausible within the realms of the world that has been built as its platform. Honestly, that does make sense, even with my limited experience of the sci-fi genre as a whole. I do admit to having to accept a whole bunch of stuff and hold onto a certain confusion for quite a bit of the book, but by the time I got to the nitty gritty of it all, it all did become clear. The world that the author created was credible and the history he weaved around and about the characters all made sense to me, eventually. There was enough interest and intrigue to keep me reading on and I was never confused enough to give up. My patience and understanding being well rewarded when the truth finally all came out.
And, by the end of the book, as I was reaching the final pages, I started to get a little sad that I would be saying goodbye to some of the characters I had grown close to along the way. There are some quite shocking observations to be had along the way too, some of them quite close to the mark, other delivered with some really cracking tongue in cheek humour.
All in all, a rip-roaring, bonkers, high octane, space opera that kept my attention nicely throughout and left me both satisfied and hankering for more of the same. My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.