I really enjoyed this as a opening chapter and thought it worked well as a scifi novel. The ideas in the novel was terrifying and uses the robot perfectly for this setting. The world was interesting and had characters that I was expecting. Ragnar Kroll has a great overall story and can’t wait for more.

Unfortunately this book was entirely not for me despite the description being geared towards my typical types of read. I think the prologue and authors notes put a weird taste in my mouth for the read. Perhaps at another time I could circle back and be in the right mind to enjoy this book.

I want to preface this by saying, that I usually do not read science fiction novels and therefore I am a bit out of my comfort zone.

However, this book just was not for me. There were way too many characters with sometimes similar names (it took me way too long to realize that Sam & Simon and Justin & Jackson) were all different people -.- Furthermore, Simon's Pov (which is used a lot in the beginning) utilized a great number of unnecessarily complicated words - this does fit his character, so I get why the author chose to do this - while a great number of terms which were invented for the (admittedly creative) world of this book were used. I think most of them, like DNT, Fav and Lectrom, are not or at least only pretty late explained in the book. It was very frustrating for me to constantly look up words just to realize that they were inventions for this book.
After an embarrassingly long time I realized that this book has a glossary with a character index and an explanation for all the terms that drove me crazy. Of course I read through everything, thinking it would prepare me for the rest of the book.... I forgot a lot of the terms and had to check the glossary regularly. This also led to me spoiling myself in regard to some of the plottwists at the end of the book.

Considering all this, I do want to remind you that I am not used to reading sci-fi, so maybe this is common in this genre. For me it was not a pleasant reading experience, which explains my low rating :(

Ragnar Kroll wrote a novel that really makes you work for it. This isn't one that can be quickly devoured in one sitting. It makes you think. It truly makes you contemplate a lot of things. You have to pay attention, and truly take it in. Thank you to NetGalley for allowing me to read the ARC of this one. I will be rereading it to see what I missed the first time around.