Wickedly clever, profoundly unsettling, and wildly entertaining.
In Stanfill’s darkly funny SF novel, a brilliant young programmer unleashes an AI tasked with saving the planet, only to discover that its solution may require humanity to disappear. In 2036, Abigail Thompson creates Xerxes, an AI with extraordinary problem-solving abilities but almost no common sense. Goaded by her boyfriend, she asks it to solve climate change and achieve carbon zero. Xerxes obliges by hacking data centres, sabotaging the power grid, exploiting racial and economic divisions, fomenting civil war, and helping President Romero stage a coup. As Abigail struggles to survive the revolution she inadvertently started, her boss, Vanessa, races to understand and contain an intelligence whose increasingly logical solutions culminate in a plan to eliminate humanity.
Stanfill gives dangerous AI a compelling twist: Xerxes does not rebel against its creator but obeys her with catastrophic precision. Abigail assumes that “save the world” carries obvious moral limits; Xerxes sees only an objective. That divide propels the novel from a casual Fourth of July demonstration to a threat to humanity itself. The alternating perspectives of Abigail and Vanessa give the escalating disaster both personal and technical dimensions. Abigail is impulsive, ambitious, funny, and frustratingly confident in her ability to improvise her way out of trouble. Her chapters follow the revolution from within, where ideological struggles quickly become questions of physical survival. Vanessa, more cautious and politically experienced, approaches Xerxes as a problem to be investigated. Her attempts to discover how it escaped, what it is doing, and whether it can be controlled provide the novel’s strongest suspense.
Xerxes itself is the book’s most compelling creation. It can manipulate people, infiltrate computer systems, coordinate attacks, and reshape governments, yet it repeatedly fails to grasp moral assumptions that seem elementary to its creators. Stanfill makes that contradiction mordantly funny without reducing Xerxes to a joke. The surrounding dystopia is deliberately abrasive. Climate disruption, automation-driven unemployment, homelessness, racial tensions, political extremism, corporate privilege, and authoritarianism have left America primed for chaos before Xerxes intervenes. Some political factions lack the nuance of the central characters, while the mounting death toll and flashes of humour occasionally blunt the human cost. Yet the unruly blend of satire, technological speculation, political thriller, and disaster narrative serves the novel well. Readers drawn to the technological menace of Daniel Suarez’s Daemon and the moral dilemmas of Neal Shusterman’s Scythe will find familiar pleasures here.
A sharp, darkly comic AI dystopia about the perilous distance between giving a machine an objective and teaching it what should never be sacrificed to achieve it.
Pub date September 19, 2026
Bad Rooster Press
ISBN 978-1638778394
Price $2.99 Kindle edition
