Remember about two days ago when I wondered if there was an AI ship-mind dungeon core (or "location incarnation" as all the cool mes are calling it) sub-genre? Well, looks like I found it. Sort of. It's the sequel to this book, in which an AI takes over an airship. This first book in the series is a bit less cool, as the AI only takes over a laboratory, but I suspect I shouldn't skip ahead.
The world in which our AI wakes up has undergone some form of cataclysm, that has broken the earth into shattered fragments, each of which has its own physical laws. The fragment our AI wakes up into has been infested with "power cores", which typically are claimed by the nearest mad person who immediately develops superpowers and no small lack of morality.
However, our main character E.M.M.A, who has been granted one of these power cores by the scavenging Anna is not a person but an AI, controlling a research facility.
E.M.M.A. is intelligent, sarcastic, obsessed with testing and likes to call Anna fat. It is something of a Portal homage. You know, like The Great Train Homage. Still, evil sarcastic AI is something of a fixed trope now, so it gets a pass.
E.M.M.A. and Anna spend the book trying to avoid being murdered, kidnapping and performing tests on the various superpowered people around them and doing all that good dungeon growing stuff. As the title implies, E.M.M.A. is a dungeon at the most basic level, so we still get the usual "these are your upgrade" options and detailed descriptions of layout and trap systems.
Luckily this doesn't get to quite the same obsession as it could have done. The kidnapping/superpowers aspect to the world gives quite a few ways that the plot can diverge from the simple "I must be the best dungeon ever" that I've seen elsewhere, and it held my interest reasonably well. There's also a decent spread of characters, either prisoners, allies or enemies, and they are sufficiently distinct to not just feel like placeholders for plot.
It's probably my last of these for a while. I have tried to pick up a third, but it felt like such a direct rehash of The Slime Dungeon that I had to put it down. As a genre, this might be even more limited than the LitRPG in terms of form (though apparently we're all calling those GameLit now), such that repetition strikes easily. A book needs to do something more than just describe how a dungeon works to be readable.
Still, I enjoyed this one, so I may pick up the sequel at some future date.
Recommended.
Tagged: Book GameLit Super-science world Novel Print