This strange melancholy book sometimes feels like a surreal video game, composed of episodic stories each of which feel like a new beginning. The bleak post-apocalyptic world is one in which humanity has dwindled to the point of vanishing. We are on the brink of extinction, watched over by AI mothers. Death is common and scattered groups of experimental strains of humans exist here and there, kept separate by watchers who observe and report back to the mothers.

I did not particularly enjoy how this book unfolded and led me through it but I appreciate it now that I’ve finished it. The early chapters hew more closely to lived experiences of the humans who live in this world and it takes almost half the book before we get some of the backstory that contextualizes the lives of the child-like characters that occupy most of the book. Kept innocent from the knowledge of all that has wreaked havoc on their world, the mutating humans are new to sex, new to violence, new to curiosity. Common coming of age tropes play out in a world of bare humanity.

The final chapter was one of my favorites. (Spoilers ahead.) We learn that the AI overlords have grown tired of humans cycling between love and conflict. They have decided to let the last two humans die. But it seems they don’t want to and one of them endeavors to re-invent a new pseudo-human race, while the other communes with the ghost of all past humans. Stark and poetic, this post-apocalyptic novel mingles the smallest trickle of hope into its river of despair.