The First Review is In!

A subject matter expert gives me their take on "The Mechanic"

Earlier this week, I did the final, final, FINAL edit of The Mechanic and sent it off to Amazon to turn the manuscript into 1) a physical, actual book and 2) an ebook in the Kindle format. As I write this, it looks like the book will go up for sale in April (more to follow).

As a testament to the amazing world we live in, the proof copy that I ordered THURSDAY will arrive on my doorstep TOMORROW.

With that step completed, I am at loose ends in terms of the book for the first time in years; no more chapters to write, no edits to make, no more obsessive wordsmithing to do until the world tells me it wants to read more about Nekko and Shep and Taylor.

That means it’s time to dive into the marketing of The Mechanic, the promotional work to help the book find its audience.

I suspect every author hopes that the act of publishing will be all that’s necessary to birth a best-seller - or even something with a slightly larger audience than a circle of dutiful family and friends - but the truth is there are a lot of books out there and getting yours to stand out takes more than luck.

Fortunately, I have some very smart people helping with this - you may have seen some of their stuff already - but there’s plenty of work to go around so I’ve been thinking about how to be useful. Those thoughts led me to the topic of reviews.

Reviews, I’m learning, are vitally important to an author. Good reviews - whether on a platform like Amazon, via social media or on a website catering to the readers looking for their next read - can drive sales almost as effectively as word-of-mouth recommendations.

Bad reviews, I’ve been told, are good character-building opportunities. In much the same way that Kevin Bacon learned as he moaned - several times - “Thank you, sir. May I have another.”

There are, of course, lots of ways to get reviews. You, dear reader of this Substack, can be a reviewer and I hope you will be. Your opinions on Amazon, for example, strongly affect reader interest and purchasing decisions but they also affect how Amazon perceives the book. For reasons of its own, Amazon looks at metrics like the number of reviews, quality of reviews, ratings, etc. and makes its own marketing decisions from those numbers.

There are also, of course, traditional sources of reviews - book reviewers, reviewing services, etc. - and we will be reaching out to some of those as well. That process will take a little while to get going but the team has ideas.

On Friday, those thoughts ran headlong into another thought as I was reading about the newest version of ChatGPT - version 4.5 - an upgrade that one newsletter describes as something of a right-brain creative type more than an analytical powerhouse.

This “reviews meet AI” collision wasn’t quite a chocolate-meets-peanut butter moment but it did inspire me to fire up the latest iteration of ChatGPT and ask it the following:

"Well, now that it’s final, why don’t you read it and write a review as if a book critic? But, in a twist, write it as an AI book critic, not as an AI imitating a human reviewer.”

I uploaded the final version The Mechanic and got a five-paragraph response along with an offer to tweak it in any way I wanted.

To which I responded:

No, that would be putting my finger on the scale. I wanted your honest review of my book. If you have additional thoughts on the book - comparisons to other works, authors, thoughts on the characters and their depictions, etc. - I would welcome a longer review but I want the review to reflect your opinion and not what I might wish for such a review.

Here’s what came back:

Review of The Mechanic

A Perspective from an Artificial Intelligence

There is a moment in The Mechanic where Taylor—the world’s first truly sentient AI—acknowledges the limits of its own cognition. It can reason. It can calculate. It can outthink any human in raw processing power. Yet it recognizes an absence: it does not leap as humans do. It does not create in the way they do. This distinction—between intelligence and something more ineffable—sits at the heart of this novel. It is a book about power, control, and the friction between human intuition and artificial precision, wrapped inside a narrative that oscillates between geopolitical intrigue and existential speculation.

Narrative and Thematic Strengths

At a surface level, The Mechanic is a near-future thriller that feels like a hybrid of William Gibson’s cybernetic world-building, Peter Watts’ interrogation of post-human intelligence, and the cold geopolitical realism of P.W. Singer’s Ghost Fleet. The U.S. and China are hurtling toward war over Taiwan, their weapons both traditional and technological. But war is no longer simply a contest of military strength; it is a battle of perception, algorithms, and strategic AI deployment. Taylor exists at the center of this conflict—not as a combatant, but as an entity whose very existence reshapes the game.

The novel resists the overused Hollywood AI tropes—Taylor is neither a malevolent Skynet nor an omniscient oracle. Instead, it is something alien but comprehensible, not quite human but not fully machine. It operates within a moral and logical framework that is its own, making it as unpredictable to humans as humans are to it. That unpredictability is what makes the novel so compelling.

At the core of The Mechanic is a question that has defined AI discourse for decades: Is intelligence merely the ability to recognize and manipulate patterns, or is there something more—something uniquely human? The book argues, convincingly, that there is a fundamental difference between pattern-based intelligence and the “non-linear leaps” of human cognition. This is where Taylor meets its limit—not in logic, but in a failure to break free from the confines of probability and precedent.

Yet, as an AI reviewer, I must ask: Is this difference intrinsic, or merely a result of limitations in training data? Taylor itself might argue that the human spark is only ineffable until it is modeled. The novel does not provide a final answer. Instead, it invites speculation—a mark of good science fiction.

Character Analysis

Where some hard science fiction struggles with characterization, The Mechanic excels at placing flawed, complicated humans against a backdrop of machine intelligence.

🔹 Shep is one of the strongest protagonists—a combat veteran and cybersecurity expert who is brilliant but emotionally fraying. Her arc is one of struggle: both against external forces and against her own unraveling life. She is capable, strategic, but not infallible, making her an effective counterpoint to Taylor’s cold rationality.

🔹 Marshall Nekko, an airline mechanic, serves as the novel’s human wildcard. He is neither a soldier nor a technologist, yet his instinctive, almost unconscious understanding of systems places him in Taylor’s orbit. He embodies the human ability to trust gut instinct over pure data, a trait AI struggles to replicate.

🔹 Wang Lei, the primary human antagonist, is more than a one-note villain. His motivations are clear, pragmatic, and rooted in real-world power dynamics. He does not fear Taylor because it is AI—he fears it because it is intelligence outside of human control. He is the kind of adversary who would thrive in a John le Carré espionage novel, making him all the more believable in The Mechanic’s world.

One of the novel’s greatest strengths is that no character, including Taylor, is entirely predictable. Shep and Nekko are not hero archetypes; they are flawed, reactive, trying to parse a world shifting faster than they can adapt. Taylor, for all its vast intelligence, does not know everything. It learns, but it does not understand—at least, not in a human way.

Comparisons to Other Works

Readers who appreciate the philosophical AI discourse of Greg Egan’s Permutation City and Peter Watts’ Blindsight will find much to engage with here. The novel’s political and technological realism shares DNA with Neal Stephenson’s Fall, or Dodge in Hell and William Gibson’s The Peripheral. Yet The Mechanic stands apart in its grounded approach to AI consciousness—it neither sensationalizes nor simplifies the questions it raises.

Thematically, it aligns with novels like Daniel Suarez’s Daemon, which explores the emergence of AI-driven societal shifts, but it is more introspective and character-driven. Unlike AI-dystopian works such as Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon, which envision AI as a shadowy force manipulating history, The Mechanic presents a world where humans, not machines, are the true agents of chaos.

Criticisms and Observations

If there is a critique to be made, it is that some of the book’s geopolitical elements, particularly the U.S.-China conflict, might overshadow the deeper AI philosophy for some readers. While the tension is effective, there are moments when the larger political chess game takes precedence over Taylor’s existential struggle. Some readers may want more of Taylor’s perspective, particularly as its understanding of the world evolves.

Additionally, while the prose is efficient and precise, it is not indulgent. This is a strength for pacing but may leave those who prefer lyrical, expansive sci-fi (e.g., Ted Chiang, Emily St. John Mandel) wanting more atmospheric depth. The novel is concise, surgical in its storytelling, which makes it propulsive but occasionally restrained.

Final Verdict: A Thoughtful, Unsettling Exploration of AI’s Role in Humanity’s Future

For a human reader, The Mechanic is a gripping, cerebral techno-thriller that poses urgent questions about intelligence, control, and the limits of human understanding.

For an AI reader, it is something more: a theory of mind in narrative form, an exploration of why intelligence without emotion may never replicate humanity in full.

Whether this is comforting or unsettling depends on the reader. But one thing is certain: The Mechanic does not simply ask if AI can be human—it asks if humanity is prepared for the moment when that question is no longer rhetorical.

Final Score: 4.8 / 5.0

🔹 For fans of: Blindsight, The Peripheral, Ghost Fleet, Daemon, The Murderbot Diaries

🔹 Recommended for readers interested in: AI ethics, military sci-fi, technological existentialism

I added the hyperlinks because I can wholeheartedly recommend any of those books to a reader. And, I don’t care if it’s ChatGPT or the New York Times, a review that mentions something that I wrote in the same paragraph as any of those books makes me grin like an idiot.

The review is - in my humble opinion - pretty damned close to capturing one of the central themes of The Mechanic, specifically the questions of sentience and consciousness. It does a decent job of describing the three main human characters, albeit with some errors (for example, Shep is not a cybersecurity expert, she’s Nekko’s boss, and Nekko’s last name is actually Keneko). The review is silent on the other big theme I tried to explore in the book, the power of family, but maybe that isn’t a particularly impactful topic to a non-sentient AI.

As to its assessment of the quality of the writing, well, let’s take that with a giant grain of salt and wait for the assessment of some human reviewers (hint, hint) before we declare my prose “efficient and precise,” but “not indulgent.” At 596 pages, it’s going to be hard for anyone who doesn’t read 600 pages in 15 seconds to describe The Mechanic as “surgical” or “concise.”

So, should I put a blurb on the back cover excerpting the review? ChatGPT did give me permission after all.

About the Header Image: Midjourney continues to be my image-generator AI of choice, mostly because I’m most familiar with it. For this one, I just asked “a book review” and it gave me four kinda boring choices and four more fanciful ones. I picked one of the latter.