If you're looking for something mind-bending and challenging, try Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie.
The premise is that giant space-battleships are run by AI. And this AI has multiple consciousnesses in the form of ancillaries: soldiers and workers in human form that are controlled by the AI but have their own perception. So the AI is constantly monitoring and controlling hundreds or thousands of perspectives. These ancillaries can be stored for thousands of years, if need be. In the present time of the novel, they seem to be out of favor. Regular humans are employed more often.
These ships also have a human captain, to which the AI becomes very attached (some battleship AI actually lost their minds when the captain was killed).
We are operating in a milieu like the Roman-empire. The Radch Empire has grown large and vast and wide. There are fragments and factions. The emperor, Anaander Minaaii, has many versions of herself. Clones and clones, all running the empire in various places. One of these clones orders our hero, the AI of the ship The Justice of Toren, to kill the Lieutenant she loves: Lieutenant Awn. The ship completes the task because she must obey the order, but then rebels. The ship learns that there are many factions of Anaander Minaai, with different objectives.
The ship is destroyed . . . but one ancillary gets away. One fragment of the AI's consciousness. And this ancillary swears revenge! If you can make it that far, things then start to make some sense.
The book takes place in multiple time strands. All genders are referred to as "she" because Radch speech is genderless.
The novel is a tough read, with themes evocative of Marvin Minsky's The Society of the Mind.
Minsky was the co-founder of the artificial intelligence lab at M.I.T. He's was a real heavyweight in the field of computer cognition. I wonder if he could have made sense of this novel . . .
It's nice to know that I'm not the only person who struggled while reading this book. The folks at Wired Magazine read it as well, and they also found it challenging . . . and they work for Wired!
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