It kept me up several nights because I absolutely could not go to bed before finishing the chapter (and inevitably wanting to read one more after that). Like Sarya, we learn what’s going on in pieces, and while there are many, many twists that surprised me, in retrospect they were all hinted at throughout. Incorrect expectations aside, I really enjoyed this book. It’s about living in a world in which you know, for a fact, that there are beings exponentially smarter than you, beings that are playing grandmaster-level chess while you’ve been playing Kindergarten tic-tac-toe your whole life. But The Last Human is more about the concept of superintelligences and their implications. Based partially on the webcomic, which is a lot lighter in tone, I thought that this novel was going to be about what could possibly make humans unique among other intelligent life-and there is that, a little bit. I will say that this book was not what I had expected. Through the chain of events that follows, Sarya’s (and our) understanding of her world starts to explode outwards. So it’s safe to say that while she’s surviving, she doesn’t have much to look forward to as she gets older.īut one day, a stranger recognizes her and says he knows where she came from.
She lives in a galaxy-wide society stratified by intelligence levels, and in order to avoid detection she is forced to pretend to be a species that is only mentally capable of the most menial labor. On top of normal teenager issues, she constantly has to hide her true species. Sarya has started to become less and less happy with her lot in life. None of them suspect that Sarya the Daughter, the adopted daughter of the deadly spider-like Shenya the Widow, is in fact Sarya the Human. In The Last Human: A Novel, humans have been officially extinct for almost 100,000 years, and even now the name of the species fills members of galactic society with dread. So obviously, I put this first on my list of post-studies novels to read once I found more time. I somehow stumbled upon Zack Jordan and Luyi’s webcomic (which seems to follow an alternate timeline), and I fell in love with the concept, but I didn’t have the time or mental bandwidth for non-dissertation books. I first learned of this book while I was working on my dissertation. I’ve wanted to read Zack Jordan’s The Last Human: A Novel for a very, very long time.
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