I enjoyed this novel, and am glad to see S. B. Divya putting out a full-length work. Her writing is very different from most SF writers' prose and it's refreshing.
The social speculation is interesting here--we have an arms race between people and machines with people using ever-more dangerous enhancements to continue to compete with weak AIs (WAIs). From the omniscient author's perspective this situation is very contrived, with "funders" playing WAIs and humans against each other, but the protagonists of the story are very attached to it. On the surface the plot is a little simplistic and a very straightfoward extrapolation from current events. But I like her characters--they are not super-introspective deep thinkers and have kind of ordinary wants and desires for their lives, something I think SF readers forget about most of the people they encounter in the world. And there's more to this plot than meets the eye--the movement for machine emancipation is the central motivation for the action, and yet there is no WAI character or description of a situation from a WAI perspective. It's a pointer to the WAI emancipation being a sideshow--and the characters are aware of this possibility. This is not really resolved at the end of the book so it's hard to say if I'm actually seeing something that the author intended. Don't know...I do know that the action carries the book along nicely and I read it with interest all the way through. Worthy of its nomination for a Nebula.
