Mat Groom

As an IT professional with coding experience, reading this book felt like what doctors must deal with any time they watch a medical show on TV – a catalog of teeth-grinding inaccuracies clearly only added for the sake of drama.

If you can accept the basic premise that a game developer could accidentally create a self-aware, artificially intelligent NPC and then find a way to bring the NPC out of the game and into a robotic body, you’ll probably find a lot to like about this book, especially the art.

I was too distracted by the fact that the developer carries around the code for the NPC in some kind of glowing orb that projects a hologram of the character’s face. The orb (precious, breakable) is the only copy of that character (no backups or code check-ins, I guess) so when the villainous CEO of the game company breaks the orb in a fit of rage, the developer is in danger of losing all her work.

I liked the idea of this book more than the execution.… (meer)