This wasn't BAD it just fell into some reoccurring issues I have with recent queer literature where it sorta feels like queer characters are not quite allowed to actually be people, they have to be idealized and sometimes childish.

First, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for your time and energy spent on this piece of very important fiction. The world needs more queer content among all outlets. I LOVE fiction that depicts future worlds or other worlds and landscapes, especially those that feature queer protagonists. I recently gained even more appreciation for queer fiction when I realized that many queer stories and folklore died along with our queer relatives during the AIDS crisis and when I learned that nearly all written, queer fiction was destroyed at the hand of one homophobic man in the 1950’s (Stith Thompson). Although I am a cis, gay male and to the extent that I am able to understand and empathize with my trans peers - the characterization felt very in-line with literature and activist’s experiences (I.e. Alok Vaid-Menon) that I’ve consumed regarding the [natural] state of being Trans and/or Non-binary. I say all of this to say, that my opinion about the book, itself, is by no means grounded in Transphobia and although I have critiques, this piece is still important; it should and needs to be published and consumed and shared. **Review** I enjoyed the diversity of protagonists. I enjoyed the parallel that I believe the author drew between the human character and the virtual being - that was a very neat and unique way to retell the Trans narrative and experience, with a sci-fly twist. How cool! What I had trouble with, regarding the book, was that it did not seem to go to the depths that I would have preferred. It simply did not captivate me like I thought that it would. The book just didn’t have that “it factor.” You should know, I have no formal book-critic background…so, I’m sorry that I do not have better language to describe my opinion and please take it with a grain of salt - instead of better language, I can only give an example - there was something about “The Darkness Outside Us” by Eliot Schrefer that captivated me… and I don’t think that it was simply because, as a cis, gay male, I was able to relate to the protagonists. No, that’s not it - More so, the story, again, had more depth, yet still an easy read. It got my heart-racing. The narrative was so unique (to me). The twists and turns, unexpected. Character development seemed deeper. The research that the author describes at the conclusion of the book, I could tell that took the narrative to the ‘next level.’ I felt that ‘next level’ was missing from this book. å

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review!

Are you interested in reading about the philosophical debates around artificial sentience? Fights (and treaties!) with motorcycle-riding religious pirates? The desert wastes of an almost post-apocalyptic Utah? Maybe you're just looking for a sweet romance between a trans man and his AI boyfriend? If any of these piqued your interest, then "World Running Down" is perfect for you!

"World Running Down" by Al Hess is a lovely story about Valentine, a trans man, and Osric, an AI trapped in an android body, traveling together through the ruins of a run-down, near-future Utah. Valentine's a scavenger, trying to get together enough money from doing odd jobs to get a visa so that he can live in a city and finally transition the way he wants to. He's traveling with another scavenger, Ace, and together the two go from town-to-town picking up jobs and studying for the inevitable citizenship test they'll have to take if they get their visas. While stopping in a settlement one day, Valentine meets Osric, a person from the city sent as a messenger to tell the two scavengers about a job from a high-paying client. Oh, and Osric's also a Steward (one of the city's AI guardians) illegally trapped in an android body.

There was so much I loved about this book. I'm always a sucker for discussions of what qualifies as artificial intelligence and sentience, and "World Running Down" explored these ideas in a way that was thoughtful and felt natural. I loved the conversations between Valentine, Osric, and various androids and Stewards about sentience. This book was such a refreshing read and reminded me thematically of "A Psalm for the Wild-Built" (one of my favorite recent speculative releases) in a lot of ways, although the stories themselves are very different. I think it's that both books handle discussions of AI and sentience in similarly compelling ways.

I also thought the romance between Val and Osric was sweet and built up well within the narrative. It didn't feel instalovey at all to me, but it's also clear that a spark was there from the beginning, and Hess develops that attraction well. I also loved how the Valentine and Osric are able to connect to each other through the idea of both being "in the wrong body" in a sense - Val wishes he had a more traditionally cis masculine form, and Osric has never been in a humanoid body before. I wouldn't have made that connection on my own, but the way the two talked about their experiences felt natural and made a lot of sense with the internal logic of the world.

On the topic of Valentine's trans identity - sometimes Valentine experiences transphobic microaggressions, and there are references to explicit transphobia off-page, but I appreciated that Hess's depiction of both felt respectful and purposeful. Sometimes Valentine is misgendered on-page, but he always steps up and tries to shut it down as soon as he can, or another character steps forward to support him. Most people he encounters are actually accepting of his gender identity, and if they misgender him initially, it's an accident, and they switch to the correct pronouns and name for him as soon as they learn they've made a mistake. It's even a major plot point that the central city in the novel offers HRT and gender-affirming surgeries to its citizens, covered under the city's healthcare plans. Fair warning that Val does bind with bandages/tape sometimes in the novel, but I really can't blame him - man's essentially living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Overall, all of the author's choices around displaying the transphobia (or lack thereof) that Valentine experiences throughout the novel felt purposeful and realistic. Obviously, Utah as a futuristic desert wasteland full of wandering pirates and androids isn't exactly realistic - but each instance felt like it made sense within the greater understanding of the story.

In general, I was just ecstatic to see such a well-developed gay and trans character in a well-written romance with an equally well-developed gay character. They were wonderful.

With all my praise of it, you probably won't be surprised to here that there wasn't much I disliked about this novel. Mostly, I wished there'd been more of it! I did feel like there were some plot points that weren't fully resolved, or ideas that weren't wrapped up completely, but none of these were major in the grand scheme of the story. There were moments when I wished I'd gotten to learn a little more about the history of the futuristic world Valentine and Osric lived in, but again, this had no bearing on the main plot.

I'm definitely going to be recommending this book to friends! As I was reading it, I already had a mental list going of the people in my life who I thought would love it. Definitely pick it up if you're interested in reading a character study of a trans man doing what he can to transition in a falling-apart world, or if you're looking for a queer romance against a speculative near-futuristic setting. Even if you're just looking for another quick read about AI, this could be the book for you! I cannot recommend it enough.

I loved World Running Down by Al Hess.
I had never heard of this book before but I had to request to read it when I saw what it was about and I'm so happy I did.
Everything about it was so good!
I loved the characters so much, the story was so much fun and the writing was really good.
It's definitely become a new favourite!
I highly recommend this book!
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

You could be forgiven for wondering whether a fractured, desert-plagued dystopia is the place to find and be true to yourself.

After all, it’s hardly a quiet couch in an air-conditioned therapist’s office where you can explore the depth and breadth of who you really are; and yet this is precisely the environment in which transgender salvager Valentine Weis, the goodhearted protagonist of World Running Down by Al Hess, finds himself in a future Utah wracked by societal collapse, save for scattered highly religious piratical settlements where want is great and supply is near nil and gleaming cities of excess and plenty, closed to anyone who isn’t a citizen.

It’s not a pretty place, and it’s certainly not easy, and the priority is simply staying alive, whether it’s finding enough food to eat and water to drink or avoiding the arrows of marauding salt flat pirates, and yet it is here, in the most hostile of worlds that Valentine embraces his true gender, casts aside his deadname, and dreams of a place in an urban idyll like Salt Lake City where he can get all the testosterone he needs and the surgery he craves to match the image he has of a future self, gleaned from a magazine scrap he keeps in his pocket, of a man in a suit leading a seemingly untroubled life.

It’s an intoxicating vision, but despite he and his fractious fellow salvager, Ace, who are not so much friends as allies of convenience, working as hard as they can, and taking all the gigs they’re offered, they simply can’t scrape up the money they need for a visa to Salt Lake City nor the time to study for the citizenship test.

Then, a drop dead gorgeous android named Osric turns up in the next town they arrive in, offering a glittering and long-sought prize from a escort agency owner in Salt Lake – recover a group of eight stolen female androids taken by a greedy ex-employee, return them to their place of employment and gain the chance to turn that magazine shred vision from pipe dream to lived reality.

Valentine and Ace take no time at all to say “yes” – not strictly speaking true since there are some misgivings but in the end, it’s all they ever wanted so how can they say “no”? – and off they go, Osric in tow, to find that what one person simply referred to as property are in fact self-aware androids who are not at all enthusiastic about heading home.

Cue a moral dilemma of fairly epic proportions, one which fills the grippingly affecting narrative of World Running Down with an emotional resonance so palpable you sense that you could reach out and touch it.

This is a novel that perfectly sets up what’s at stake, that establishes in some truly impactful empathic ways what it feels like to not be allowed to be your true self, to be denied the means to realise what you know to be true, and then to be asked to deny that to someone else for self gain.

It isn’t in Valentine’s nature to be selfish, and despite a burning need to deal with his gender dysphoria and stop the propensity of people to see him as someone he is definitely not, and to be with Osric who turns out to be the best thing to ever happen to him, we spend much of World Running Down with our earnest protagonist wrestling with what it will mean to deny his dream to give someone else theirs.

He is not alone in his quest for truth in identity and self.

Osric, poured against his will into an android body from the vast, all-consuming AI network he once called home, is grappling with whether he wants to return to that digital utopia or to stay in a meat body which, despite its annoying need for food, water and sleep, offers all kinds of benefits, not least the chance to kiss Valentine as much as humanly possible.

That is, of course, the million question at the heart of this beautifully-wrought, emotionally complex novel, the great struggle tat the heart of this luminously-moving, gritty, world-building queer masterpiece being a deep dive into who am I really and how do I bring that person into being?

While Valentine and Osric have to attack this great dilemma from different angles – Valentine knows who he is but doesn’t have the means to realise it while Osric is caught between two worlds though increasingly, against all his expectations, there’s one quite tangible one in which he’d like to remain – theirs is a universal quest to be true to themselves, no matter the cost.

No matter how you look at it, World Running Down is an utterly involving, vividly-realised exploration of what it means to truly know and bring your true self into being against a backdrop that seems wholly inimical to that task.

While the background of Valentine’s quest to live his true life as his true self is brutalist and apocalyptic, it’s not so different, existentially at least, from a host of queer people who daily face misunderstanding in their earnest need to simply live their truth, and who must make some tough decisions to make that happen.

Hess has captured the enormity and expansively intense emotional scope of how this feels and how it manifests in real and tangible ways and set against an enthrallingly epic broken world where anything is possible but coterminously so few things are.

Feel familiar?

That’s the deeply affecting beauty of World Running Down – it offers a sci-fi story so well-realised and so imaginatively told that you feel every last pothole on the salt flat roads and every last flash of disappointment and hope, all set in a world so completely different to our own in a potent physical sense but which feels very much like our reality where the rich control everything, the poor struggle at the margins and those who simply want to be themselves, like Valentine face an uphill struggle to be true to themselves and in so doing, make the lives of others better too, regardless of the cost.

You can’t read this superlatively good book, which bristles with all kinds of dark and terrible things but also the rich truth and moving humanity of being true to yourself, without fervently hoping that things will work out in the end, and that even if they don’t, at least central characters like Aimee and Osric will stay rewardingly true to who they are right until the end of this utterly beguiling and deeply affecting romp across a future dystopian America.

I wanted to like this more than I did. The concept is fascinating and there's a very dystopian-mad-max feel filled with romance and love but the writing didn't stick with me. I felt the potential didn't hit the roof with a story such as this and was disappointed with the writing itself.

For what sometimes seems like a very pessimistic take on a possible future, World Running Down is a heartwarming read. I adored the characters, and the way the android and AI characters' search for self-realisation mirrored the similar journeys of the human characters. Though I'm perhaps not best placed to comment, I thought the trans masculine representation here was brilliant - the depictions of Valentine's dysphoria felt accurate. Al Hess also isn't afraid to confront tougher aspects of this world, but there's a wonderful undercurrent of care and empathy throughout.
The plotting becomes a tad erratic towards the end, but overall this was a highly enjoyable book - it felt like a refreshingly new take which can sit alongside the canon of other semi-apocalyptic road-trip through the desert tales.

I'm so happy this book exists, and I can't wait to start making people read it. I've thought about it a great deal since finishing it, and keep bringing it up to friends I know will love it as much as I did.

Loveable cast of characters, tons of representation that felt authentic, a compelling quest, and a vibrant setting.

It took a few pages for me to get into, bc the beginning exposition was a tad clunky. There were also a few moments where I was confused as a lot happened in a short period of time, and it almost felt like I'd skipped some pages? But once I went back and purposefully slowed down and reread, the confusion went away. Honestly pretty minor nitpicks, though, and I look forward to reading many more books by Al Hess.

(ARC provided by Angry Robot)

I requested a digital copy in order to sample the prose on my phone (since I don't have a eReader) before requesting a physical copy for review. My review will be based on the physical ARC I read (if I qualify)

Great read if you like The Maze Runner/ The Hunger Games books.
The story flows through the book at a great pace, the ending I thought was a tad quick and I saw coming a few chapters before the bed.
But yeah all in all a good book

This really feels like a case of writing the book that you want to read and reaping the rewards. It's more empathetic, more romantic, and more fun than the Mad Max, Blade Runner, dystopian stories that have come before it. The characters are likeable and feel fully realized. The pacing is quick. The sci-fi ideas are interesting, while never bogging down the adventure. I think my one complaint is that the climax is a bit scattered as it ties up each of its plot threads, but that doesn't ruin the adventure as a whole.

Frankly, I think there needs to be more books like this, about kindness and love, and I'm thankful I got to read it.