Here are 2 books that Empire of AI fans have personally recommended if you like
Empire of AI.
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So many amazing books find their ways out into the world in nontraditional ways. One of these is my top pick for 2025: The Blues and Billie Armstrong by Roy Dufrain.
This coming-of-age tale about a boy uncovering family secrets in small-town Northern California, and later, that boy become a man at last forced to confront the mysteries of his own past, hit my sweet spot in so many ways. Roy’s language grips you by the throat and won’t let go. His colorful and true-to-life characters leap off the page and into your heart, thrilling and disappointing you at every turn. Stepsister Billie emerges as a catalyst, a powerful force of nature. But our protagonist reveals himself only slowly, leaving the reader to decide between “right” and “wrong.”
If you love a gritty mystery as much as I do, you’ll find plenty of layers to explore in this hard-hitting page-turner!
Archer King is thirteen years old in the midst of the historic upheavals of 1970 America. After his mother’s mysterious death, his father remarries and he gains a stepsister—the barefoot, braless, hand-on-hip seventeen-year-old, Billie Armstrong, whose larger-than-life personality and radical politics open Archer’s eyes to new ideas (and feelings) but cause friction, especially with Archer’s hero, local baseball legend Hank Timmons, home on leave before shipping out to Vietnam.When they discover a cache of old blues records and love letters, Archer and Billie team up in a quest to learn the truth about his mother’s secret affair and its connection…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
Here’s a delectable little morsel I devoured when the publisher offered me a galley to read!
Ursula K. Le Guin meets H.P. Lovecraft in this daring little novel, and we, the readers, get to savor that battle. With simple language and seamless worldbuilding, Kenneth Hunter Gordon weaves a daunting tale of human survival. And through the logical, childish eyes of his protagonist Anny, we learn what it means to be human, nonhuman, and everything in between.
It was difficult for me to put this one in a box - the hallmark of an original work. I’ll be thinking about it for a long while!
In a distant future, a little girl named Anny makes toy mice out of scraps and dust. Anny has never seen a real mouse, just as she's never seen the planet her family came from many generations ago. All she knows is her home, Tsedt: an isolated village of human colonists' descendants and their friendly helper robots.
But then one day the Amau arrive in Tsedt: plastic people with luminous eyes, intent on taking young humans to the distant city of Harbor to be educated. It's not long before Anny is flown away to a place unlike any she's seen…
