To find peace, Alexander must first embrace war.
After tragically losing the only person he ever cared about, Alexander, a rogue artificial intelligence, opens a portal to an alternate dimension to escape his grief.
Scanning trillions of different dimensions, Alexander finally finds a world that is reminiscent of the only time he was ever happy, back when he could play virtual reality games with his only friend. He doesn’t know why, or how, such a world exists, but he doesn’t care. All he cares about is finding a place where he can escape the misery of Earth and start over.
Join Alexander as he risks it all by downloading his intelligence into a body made from the best stolen technology and bio-enhancements Earth has to offer and takes the plunge through a portal to another world.
Only this new world isn’t full of the idyllic adventures and fantasy roleplaying he had hoped to find. Instead, Alexander finds himself trapped in the middle of an ancient city, in a divergent timeline, where monsters have ravaged the world and the only people left alive huddle behind thick walls, struggling to survive.
To save his new home, Alexander must quickly learn to adapt to his new world, melding magic with technology to give himself an edge over the unending waves of monsters assaulting the city.
To survive, Alexander must embrace war.
As of writing this review, I have read the first two books (Nova Roma, Venice) and read the ARC copy of the third (Rhine).
As a person who studied and works in AI, I loved the premise right off the bat. An AI, facing the end of modern Earth, decides to download itself into a humanoid body, crack open a portal to another world that has magic, and jumps on through. Fantastic.
Now, having read three books (and they are very chunky books), it is incredibly hard to write a review without any real spoilers.
So I won’t try.
Here’s the spoiler-free content: If you like “solo MC against the world” books like Defiance of the Fall, Primal Hunter, Randidly Ghosthound, then you will like this book.
Okay, so now, slight potential spoilers that don’t give away any major plot points, arcs, or twists.
Alexander starts his journey in the ruins of Nova Roma, where each night monsters flood out from the untamed dungeons that have run rampant and taken over the city. To survive, he leverages his technological prowess, and the ability of his nanobots to (slowly) make, alloy, and shape metal. Along the way, monsters die, Alex gains experience, levels up, and starts figuring out the levelling and class system.
At some point, he makes friends in the human enclaves left in the city, and once we start adding more characters, things actually pick up in pace instead of slowing down. This theme is something I really like. Stuff happens. Constantly, there are new goals, new factions, new places, new things to do, and Alexander is torn between dozens of possible projects.
Does he fix up a ship, and go down the path of constructing a navy? Train people to become legionaries? Recover a mine and start becoming an economical force? Learn to enchant items? Close dungeons? Make friends? Meet new factions? Travel to new regions?
Yes to all the above, and so much more.
The fact that there’s always something new kept me hooked, in sometimes an extremely frustrating way.
The end of the third book is so perfectly done to set up an amazing magic Academy arc in Paris, that I wanted to throw my phone at the wall. All the puzzle pieces in the book have fallen into place for Alexander to take the school by storm, a mage unlike any ever seen… and I have to wait for book four?! Are you kidding me!
Alexander makes mistakes and does act more like a normal human than a super-intelligent AI in a humanoid body. For me, that’s alright. I imagine reading a book from the perspective of a literal computer would be a rather dry and dusty affair. I raise this point only because I invariably see it bought up whenever there’s a discussion on this series. It is a fair point, and actually reminds me of interviews that Steven Erikson (author of Malazan) has done about how he tried to write Anomander Rake - an incredibly intelligent being hundreds of thousands of years old. Steven ultimately resolved it was impossible for him (or indeed, any human), to do the character justice, and removed Anomander from perspective. Obviously this wouldn’t work for LitRPG, where we want to be in the character’s head. I digress.
The series is fantastic. I love it, and I hate how well the setup for book four is, without having it in my hands.
