STARRED Book Review: Glitches of Gods

Reviewed by Andrea Marks-Joseph

A genius engineer’s righteous reluctance to fine-tune the next big thing in AI is interrupted by sudden bouts of rebooting himself into parallel realities.

AI-engineer (and our protagonist) Julien is best described by his colleagues as a difficult but brilliant coworker. He may have “helped create a near-sentient AI[, but] the thing went rogue, got some people killed, pissed a few others off, and stirred up quite some trouble. It was the most thrilling episode in our corporate history. The company decommissioned the AI, and Julien’s been working under the radar ever since.” That all sounds fair, and any reasonable person would think that Julien certainly deserves a break to decompress, but that’s not quite how it’s going. 

The company is now pressuring Julien to help build a better version of the AI entity, correcting mistakes they haven’t quite identified yet—with an urgent, corporate-led timeline to meet a deadline of attending an industry expo. Oh, and there’s also the small detail of Julien running “the annoying, people-killing virtual assistant he was not supposed to have” as his personal AI system at home. 

Julien and Orec (the AI) have an entertaining, intimate, familial relationship. Their shared history and sense of humor is immediately apparent. On top of all that, Julien suddenly finds himself thrust into new near-realities, where there are slight changes to his real life. Not only is it happening unexpectedly, but it’s happening repeatedly, and so each time he must re-investigate his reality—often reliving traumatic events. 

No matter which reality Julien finds himself in, he must go to work. Julien does his job reluctantly, stalling updates as and when he can, mainly because he’s (rightfully and righteously) conflicted about his role in any further impending AI-related doom. He’s also grappling with grief and guilt for the effects of the failure last year, which led to the death of twenty people, his father being one of them. 

Outside of work, Julien has two friends, Chris and Dennie, who spend most of their time together planning memes to warn people of AI’s risks. “Farfetched as it seemed, memes held a particular power over people. More than one government had been toppled with the help of a few widely shared images and slogans.” That line on its own would have sold me on this book! But there’s so much more to love about this intricate, riveting story by author Jurgen Appelo. 

Glitches of Gods’ worldbuilding is so authentic that—despite this being a future way more advanced than ours—it feels unquestionably relatable to the present-day reader. I love that Julien’s social circle communicates as if they’re sick of each other, but clearly hold their friendships close. I immediately fell in step with the dynamic between Julien and his in-house AI assistant, Orec, and understood how communication varies with Julien’s office-mate slash far-fetched work crush, and how that differs from Julien’s disdain for his boring colleagues. 

I love that Julien’s colleagues kind of hate him for seeming like he’s not invested in the project they’re working on, even though he has every right to be. They have to be cordial with him because they need his genius to complete the project. It’s all so real! (“How do you know our current approach isn’t worse?” Julien asks of his team. “How do you know it won’t kill a thousand people instead of just twenty? How do you know it won’t go after my mother this time?”) Just like in real life—and especially now—these people are well-placed to wrestle with urgent philosophical issues about the future of society and the constraints of technology, but instead they are confined to conversations about deadlines and half-hearted motivations because they have to keep their jobs. “If it’s going to happen anyway, it better be us. We must lead this race.” 

Julien’s team knows they’re the good guys in this fight to create the most advanced AI first (and therefore going to market first), but they can’t know for sure in such a secretive, high-stakes industry. There’s also a rebel movement that is entirely against AI, whose activism becomes more drastic as the story progresses. Their protests become personal (and directly dangerous) for Julien the deeper he gets involved in the effects of the developing crisis. 

Julien may be my favorite fictional character of the year, except I genuinely don’t know whether I’ve fully registered that he’s not a real person. I remain in awe of him like a professor whose work I just discovered, and I also really want to be his friend. Julien is laugh-out-loud funny even when he’s having miserable banter with his AI assistant. He’s doing his best in an impossible situation. 

Jurgen Appelo’s writing ensures that we get a full sense of who Julien is—not only as a character, but as a fully realized human, someone relatable and fun and surprising.   He’s someone you’d want to be friends with, too. While we get to read this story from various points of view, and each perspective grounds Glitches of Gods in its scale, scope, and emotional depth, Julien is the person I kept reading for. I wanted to keep hanging out with him. The major philosophical and technological conundrums that these characters deal with mirror my own concerns and interests, and I wanted to hear from his point of view. Julien surprises his friends and he surprises the reader in ways that feel so true to the human experience. To say that Appelo has brought him to life feels like an understatement. 

Julien is the only person who stood loyally by his coworker Mart during his transition, and even as his reality and sanity is called into question, he regularly checks in with Mart about his wellbeing. Julien himself is queer and single, enjoying all the joys of the full spectrum of queer sex available to him. Though he does not enjoy when his virtual assistant insists on listing the specific gender identities of every dating prospect available every single time Julien asks him to plan a hook-up for the night 

“For the sake of the gods. Just tick all fifty boxes, alright?” 

“Understood.” 

“Cisgender are welcome too, assuming they still exist.” 

“I’ll make every effort to find them.” 

“To be clear, I’m looking for just one guest tonight. I’m not a spa.” 

“There is someone on my list of candidates who self-identifies as two individuals. How would you like me to categorize them?” 

“Gods, Orec. Do I look like an accountant?” 

Jurgen Appelo perfectly encapsulates Julien’s frustration with the monotony of manually selecting all genders on a virtual dating app in an era where technology has exponentially expanded the possibilities of gender. Despite the admin of putting himself out there, Julien has incredible, enthusiastic sex with many different genders throughout the book.

This story reads very much like a for-us-by-us novel in terms of its queerness. There are genuinely funny, borderline-inappropriate jokes that feel like they’re lifted from real-life conversations between queer friends, and it’s never at the expense of someone’s dignity. The queerness is so casual and yet so deliberate. It’s fantastic to read and will make this novel an enduring favorite of many, many queer readers for years to come. 

One of my favorite examples of the care Appelo has taken in this aspect is that when we read chapters from Mart, Julien’s trans colleague’s perspective, it includes conversations with his mom without explicitly exposing us to any of her transphobia. We know that Mart’s parents aren’t supportive, but we never hear their words (and therefore trans readers are spared from hate speech on the page) because these calls are only written with Mart’s dialogue.

“Yes, I know that—

“Yes, I—

“Mom— 

“Mom, I don’t think—

“For the sake of the gods, Mom, shut up. Okay? Just shut up. This is not about you; this is about me—my identity, my journey. It took me years to understand this, to prepare for this, and now it’s done. Okay? It’s done.”

This book is a delight; it’s a gift to the genre and for our times. I’d highly recommend Glitches of Gods if you enjoy imagining the kinds of technological advances that secret teams of engineers are developing behind the scenes of our lives. This is a great book for anyone who is fascinated by how our lives might change with more advanced and integrated tech—both positively and negatively. 

Glitches of Gods is set in a world where body-modification is widely available, making bionic people a common fixture in everyday life; where billboards have the technology to display virtual reality graphics; where trans people have medical tech like testosterone calibrators at home. 

When machines begin malfunctioning around Julien, it’s disastrous on previously unimaginable levels: “Yesterday, a woman’s hand had tried to crush her parakeet, and that morning, a man had been thrown in front of a train by his own legs.” When Julien begins to see patterns in how his reality falls apart, “the streets are clogged with malfunctioning cars” before other people notice how widespread the AI errors are. “It’s as if the machines are celebrating, tossing people around like confetti,” Julien remarks, looking out at the destruction in action. 

There’s a storyline that would feel like a spoiler to discuss specifically, but I will say that it is adorable—unexpectedly pure-hearted, heartwarming, and silly in the best way. The author crafted an alternate reality with such profound, magnificent found-family energy that when we lose it in a new timeline, I had heartbroken tears welling up in my eyes and my chin literally wobbled—which I did not think actually happened outside of books and melodramatic actors in soap operas!

It’s an absolute relief that we have this story at this time. While reading this novel, I could not stop telling people how relieved and thankful I felt to have this story find its way to me at this very moment. I don’t know if there’s been a more well-placed, perfectly-suited book for our times than Glitches of Gods is for us right now. And the best part is that it’s not all-warning, neither is it all-digital-paradise. This novel is a rollercoaster ride of enthralling, high-stakes plot-twists and strange, brilliant, open-hearted people who we grow to love. I could write one-thousand words alone just about why Glitches of Gods is a perfect fit for fans of each of these stories, but I’ll simply list them instead: If you enjoyed the Peacock series Mrs. Davis, the Disney+ series Wandavision, the novel One Verse Multi by Sander Santiago, Prime Video’s Upload, AppleTV+’s show Mythic Quest, and other multiverse media—go get this book right now. 

The action in this book does not ever slow down. I cannot express how much story and landscape-shifting twists Jurgen Appelo packs into this tale. Glitches of Gods works just as well as a science fiction and fantasy novel as it does as a love letter to what makes us human—and as a showcase for the whirlwind of emotion that hits you every time you’re reminded that life simply does not care how you’re feeling; it’s gonna throw chaos at you when you least expect it. 

Near the end, at a stage of the book where—in any other novel—one major reveal and potentially one minor reveal would begin to wrap this story up and leave you breathlessly waiting for the next one, Glitches of Gods races toward its conclusion with multiple final chapters’ worth of world-rocking reveals that had me reacting physically: There’s an ending so shocking that I had to remind myself to breathe afterwards.

I can’t thank the author enough for Glitches of Gods existing as a reminder there’s always human-made art out there for those who seek it; that there are still people who care about humanity and who care about creating clever stories that convey a powerful message. I could not recommend this story more, especially if you love sci-fi and imaginative future-tech, but are feeling overwhelmed or disheartened by the current mainstream conversation around AI and how it has permeated the zeitgeist. I’ll leave you with a quote from the novel that resonated with me and reveals the spirit of this brilliant, inventive, necessary story: “We still have so much to do: Make memes, make noise, get the word out.”

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Thank you for reading Andrea Marks-Joseph’s book review of Glitches of Gods by Jurgen “Jojo” Appelo! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.