Epeolatry Book Review: Exadelic by Jon Evans

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Title: Exadelic
Author: Jon Evans
Publisher: Tor Books
Genre: Sci-fi
Release Date: September 5, 2024

Synopsis: When an unconventional offshoot of the US military trains an artificial intelligence in the dark arts that humanity calls “black magic,” it learns how to hack the fabric of reality itself. It can teleport matter. It can confer immunity to bullets. And it decides that obscure Silicon Valley middle manager Adrian Ross is the primary threat to its existence.

Soon Adrian is on the run, wanted by every authority, with no idea how or why he could be a threat. His predicament seems hopeless; his future, nonexistent. But when he investigates the AI and its creators, he discovers his problems are even stranger than they seem…and unearths revelations that will propel him on a journey — and a love story — across worlds, eras, and everything, everywhere, all at once.

This book is a lot. It starts off as The Running Man, slides into The Matrix, shifts into Back to the Future, moves into Sliders, and then ends up in a complicated multi-verse that resembles nothing else I’ve read – oh and with a sprinkle of Forrest Gump on top. It was exciting, confusing, touching, and complicated – making this a difficult review to write.

At the start of the novel we are introduced to Adrian Ross, a seemingly regular guy set to marry the woman he loves and be step-dad to her two wonderful daughters. But then his entire life is thrown off course when a powerful AI entity decides that he is the main threat to its existence. Then we launch into The Running Man.

Adrian must go on the run because it seems that everyone is out to get him. He has allies, but he isn’t sure exactly who to trust or who will get killed trying to help him. Adrian has to alter his appearance, break out of prison, and dodge certain death before he comes face to face with an old friend-turned-foe who drops a mind-blowing revelation about his past. From there, Adrian travels back in time and through other dimensions to learn the true nature of the universe and his place in it. He interacts with historical figures and deals with the implications of time travel.

I enjoyed the unpredictable nature of the book and most of the twists. Some parts, like the extended torture sequence, I could have lived without, but other parts were intriguing. My favourite part was when the time travel began because I love time travel stories. If I grew tired of a section, the book quickly whisked me off to something new, which was both a blessing and a curse because it made it hard to settle into anything. After a while, I gave up trying to understand all the minutiae of the story and just went along for the ride. It made for a better time because there was a lot of scientific theoretical exposition.

Adrian himself could have been a stronger character. For a lot of the story, he seemed to be just going along for the ride himself. He was more reactive than proactive for most of the book. Although, in such a plot heavy book, a lot of the time he had to be reactive. Most of the rest of the characters were too quickly discarded to get attached to, leaving Adrian as our only anchor through the changing tides of this tumultuous story.

In general, the book was a bit too all over the place for me, and while I enjoy a certain amount of unpredictability in a story, I found this one rather tiring. This book will probably work better for fans of heavy sci-fi and multiverses than it did for me.

/5

Available from Amazon and Bookshop.

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