Wow! Dark Theory blew my mind. My impression based on the cover was so positive. I loved everything about the cover and it's what drew me in initially. The first sentence had me quickly hitting the read button... "A robot yearns to remember. A thief struggles to forget. A galaxy on the verge of collapse." I honestly didn't need to read anymore to know that I should immediately read it. This took me a little longer to read just because it's a CHONKER (which I love by the way). I loved how imaginative this was.

3.5/5 stars

Dark Theory is one of the very few books that I requested for without checking any pre-existing reviews. The cover along with the first line of the blurb - "A robot yearns to remember. A thief struggles to forget. A galaxy on the verge of collapse" was enough to pull me. Reading these three lines still feels good to me. Makes me think, "Now that will be some story"

Enough talk on blurb. Let's get into the actual book. I liked it. It felt like the book could have been shorter, or could have been edited better, but I liked it. The characters were all real. well rounded and had good justifiable arcs. There are a number of characters that we follow through the course of the story - Beetro (the robot), Miree (the thief), Ribcage at times (What an amazing name!) and Adam. All four of them were interesting! None of the characters felt flat and I identified well with each of their character motivation. Am saying this with admiration, because when a story follows multiple characters, some of them hold your interests better than the others. Add a different world setting and philosophy to each of them and very few books manage to retain same level of intensity in all of those threads. Dark Theory does it well. There are a number of characters that were introduced later and they were instantly likeable slash relatable as well. Emotion or mood wise, the sub plots move from thriller to action adventure to a streak of borderline horror at times, and I was emotionally engaged through it all.

My only issue with the book was its length. I am not sure if I was just in a reading slump or if this is objectively true, but I felt the book could have been shorter. This is not to say that I didn't enjoy whatever the book presented, just that it made me impatient to get to the endgame. It might have partially been because of plot and partially because of pacing issues, but it felt meandering. Because of this, by the time the book ended it felt tedious and there was a bit of urge missing from my end to look out for the next installment ASAP

Overall, I'd wait for the next installment for the characters, for the world building and for the writing. As for this one, I liked the book and recommend picking this one up!

In Dark Theory, a rag-tag group searches for purpose by traveling through dangerous lands. The group starts small with unlikeable characters – the good person, Lucindi, was killed off almost immediately. The band grows both in number and in the depth of the characters. At first, they believe one man (the robot Beetro’s creator) is the key, but as the galaxy begins to unwind before their very eyes, the keys to survival become complex and nearly impossible.

The best part of Dark Theory was watching the characters develop. Lucindi is constantly held up as the angel everyone ought to be. The idea of friendship is, at first, foreign to all of them, but as they struggle together, new relationships and values form. Robots, humans, time travellers, evil military leaders, and scientists converge to sort out the past, present and future. Perhaps, if they pull together, they can save the galaxy.

This is long book – over 800 pages, but the galaxy is still at risk at the end of Dark Theory. The story did wrap up a major plot thread, but plan to read on if you want to see how it finally ends. Minus one star for the cliffhanger, but four full stars for such a great ensemble group of characters.

Through Netgalley, the publisher provided a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC!

I feel like I had to drag myself through this book and I still don't understand WHY I feel that way.

I absolutely dug the bones of this story. It's dark. It's twisty. It feels like an epic fantasy wearing a sci-fi skin and I mean that in the best possible way. The worldbuilding is great. It's got a found family theme, which I'm always a sucker for.

But I never could really...click with it. The characters never really came to life, feeling flat and one-note and contradictory. Relationships grated on my nerves in the way they were presented, especially Arrym's entire...everything, really.

Overall, I'm glad I finished I guess? It just really didn't spark the excitement I had hoped.

What a ride! This is an action-packed, expansive sci-fi story with quite a few intersecting plotlines and tons of character development. But don't let the complexity of the world intimidate you- there are many instances of our characters coming back together to revisit the big questions at hand and review what information has been gathered so far. Personally, I found such instances a bit too repetitive, but I'm also someone who often reads complex sci-fi and fantasy, so maybe this narrative method will work well for someone who is new to adult sci-fi/fantasy, or who is a slow reader and appreciates periodic plot summary moments.
Our journey starts with Miree, an emotionally reticent thief with a secretive, troubled past, as she finds a discarded robot in a junkyard. This robot, named Beetro, has no memory of who he is or where he came from, and only has the guiding directive to find someone named Galiaro, presumably his creator. Beetro agrees to help Miree pull off her great heist to steal a flake of Dark Matter, in exchange for her promise to help him find Galiaro. We also encounter a resourceful and violent teleporting orphan child, a mysterious time-traveling woman, and a young man escaped from an underground hidden society. As we search for Beetro's origins, we learn about the disappearance of the stars, and an impending disaster for the whole world. Our characters must travel a desolate planet, evading toxic terrain, a kidnapping cult of human-robot hybrids, and the conquering violence of the warlord Deluvius.
Overall, I enjoyed this book and thought the action and character evolution was well paced. I do feel like we the readers are very much told what is important, and how are characters are changing, instead of being able to piece together that story ourselves. This leads to a lot of repetition of information, and I don't personally think this book needed to be as long as it was. But, as mentioned at the start of the review, this narrative style could feel more approachable to readers who often feel intimidated by complex space operas. The story does answer enough of our major plot questions that this feels like a full story arc, but also leaves enough side plots incomplete to set up plenty of storylines for future books in this series. The science aspect of this world definitely plays fast and loose with the actual astrophysics theories around black holes, dark matter, and spacetime- this is definitely not the realistic world of novels like The Expanse- but I think the author took the seed of questions posed by particle physics and created some very interesting possibilities in this far, far-future Earth.

I read this as an ARC on Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

1 star.

I’m not usually one to give such harsh reviews, but not only I didn’t like this book at all I think it has some objective problems both in the writing and in how some themes are handled.

Let’s start with the things that I liked:

►The setting was quite interesting, that while fully sci-fi, or well, post-apocalyptic after a more technological advanced classic sci-fi, felt almost fantasy at times and I like it.

►Ribcage was a cool character. Gremlin kid with powers is always amazing.

►There were a lot of cool concepts, probably too many to be all explored with some level of detail but they’re still cool.


What I didn’t like.

I will not go into details in the case, you really want to read it, but for me was a nightmare and after dragging myself for the first half of the book (400 pages of barely something), I decided to drop it.
But here is a list of SOME of my problems with the book in random order because I already spent too much time on this.

►The writing is bizarre, in some parts the author proves to be able to write quite well and with a certain complexity and ability to describe, in others, there is no description at all. I still have no idea about how Miree looks or what are most of the people in this world wearing, except for dirt? There are paragraphs that go in the details about X thing happening and then you have a “and then they marched for a week and arrived.” to summarize the rest of the event. I had the impression that the author wrote the parts he was interested in / liked and then connected them halfheartedly.
The beginning is one of the most affected parts and I struggled to overcome the first chapters, especially the dialogues are simplistic and flat and you can’t distingue who is talking half the time.
It’s all tell and no show.

►SO MANY DEUX EX MACHINA. And so many dialogues for lore exposition/lore drop.

► The characters are some of the least characterized ones I read in a lot of time, they aren’t even just stereotypes, they’re just there and you can easily summarise them with one or two words. I remember thinking after taking half a day's pause, “Ah, yeah, this is the angry woman protagonist and this is the man one.” and that’s all I have to say after about 400 pages about them.
Also, nobody likes nobody else and while this might be a narrative choice, because “they come from a gritty and dark and angsty and terrible post-apocalyptic world where you have to kill or be killed”, it makes really difficult to care about anyone or to make any travelling section (and there is so much going around in this book) not being a sluggish fest.

►This book was listed in the LGBTQ + category of Netgallery, but despite one of the protagonists, Miree, being bi/pan (and if you want to count them, there're the incestuous clones that seem to have a preference for the male gender, with the exception of our POV clone that is the poor lonely special heterosexual) it’s anything but queer.
The woman who is Miree's initial love interest is killed in the first 3 chapters and except for a couple of very vague and mundane attraction phrases, and the fact that her death accelerates a plan she already had in mind, there is well little about it and all it’s forgotten at the appearance of the male LI. In general, the aforementioned texture has the feeling of being an afterthought. It's not queerbaiting, but is it like the adjacent? XD

“Are you a boy or a girl?”
“I’m a man” (said the robot just rebooted that didn’t even know his own name)

► Especially for being a sci-fi he is painfully biological determinist, to the point that a character who until now has only seen clones of himself (and has never noticed it, but these are details), at the sight of a woman, who obviously he doesn't know what she is, is instinctively drawn to her looks, her breasts and overwhelmed by a desire to protect her. And this is only the most striking case.

►That entire POV was painful to read because Arym is the scifi version of the "nice guy" and his behaviour towards Hawera is awful (but not in a “this is grey and morally ambiguous character” but in a “why should I care about this mediocre man” kind of way.)

So yeah, to summarise, I would like to have the hours spent on this book back.

There is always some hesitancy whenever I contemplate reading a book over 500 pages in length. So needless to say, I waffled a bit before requesting the ARC for the 814-page scifi novel kicking off a new series; however, I am glad that I did.

Dark Theory has a large cast of unique characters made up of robots, children, members of an underground separatist cult, unwilling participants in robot hybridization, time travelers, and silicon-based aliens. At its core, Dark Theory reads like a fantasy quest story that happens to have an advanced robot. As the story progresses, the science fiction elements become more and more prominent as the world between Korth, Orion, and the Fifth Kingdom unfolds before you.

The author did a wonderful job of developing a cast of primary and secondary characters that you feel a connection with. I found myself tearing up at the death of a secondary character, and I'm still mad about their passing not going to lie.

Now what kept this at a 3.5 or 4 star read for me? At 814 pages, it is intimidatingly long for folks to jump into. While reading, I found quite a bit of redundant exposition that could have cut down that page count to something that would appeal to a larger audience. Every time a new party member was added, we would get the same explanation over and over again which I found a bit frustrating. I found myself regularly skimming these conversations once I recognized that nothing new was being revealed, All told, finessing these conversations could have saved some pages in the overall count.

All in all, this was an enjoyable and imaginative world and I look forward to the sequel whenever it drops.

Thank you NetGalley and publishers for this ARC.

First of all, just to get this off my chest: Holy fuck, that was one hell of a ride. I absolutely adored this book, it was absolutely epic. I’m desperate to read the next book in this series, like seriously, if it was out already I’d probably jump straight into the next one.

I originally was interested in this book because it promised a thief and a robot trying to figure out their lives in a seemingly broken world. And that sounded great, but it was even better. I loved Betroo and Miree, but all the other characters were simply amazing too. They were all so different, and some were a little unlikeable at first, but over the course of the story and the changes they all went through, they all wormed their way into my heart. I didn’t expect this book to have a bit of a found family element, but it did and I absolutely loved it.

And if that wasn’t great enough, the story was amazing too. In the beginning, it took a while for me to get into it, I was a little confused and things were moving pretty slow for a while, but once all the characters had been introduced, the story really started to pick up speed and I was pretty much unable to put down the book for the rest of it. I also loved how this book felt like a blend of sci-fi and fantasy, which are two of my favorite genres.

I highly recommend this book to everyone who is at all interested in science fiction and books that mix sci-fi and fantasy. Seriously, it’s such a wild ride, you won’t regret picking this book up.

This is book 1 of I don’t know how many in the Dark Law series, and it looks like we have an epic fantasy quest that had babies with a sci-fi space opera - so I’m instantly interested, of course!

Ingredients? We’ve got the galaxy slowly whirling towards destruction; everything around our protagonists chaotic and messy and dirty; a new warlord crushing the fiefdom in his fists; and everyone suffering.

We’ve got the young rogue, Miree, seeking one last heist off of which to live out the rest of her days on a pile of gold, hiding from the world.

We’ve got the robot, Beetro, following Prime Directive: Find Creator, but with no memory of who that is - or of anything else, for that matter.

So, obviously, these two meet and eventually decide to pull off the best heist ever (steal a sliver of the most valuable matter in the world).

But all this, of course, is just the foreground. In the background is an unraveling galaxy, with only Beetro and his Very Special Powers able to prevent it - or quietly nudge it off the cliff and walk away.

So like I said: epic fantasy space opera, featuring queer people, and I am totally here for it!

First up - the prologue is great. No notes. Nice job.

Sadly, our protagonists don’t make the most promising start.

Miree is a grouch. She wants to make her score and retire from the world, because she hates everyone (except her scrapper friend, Lucindi). To eat, they need scrap, and if they can get a fusion core out of a scrapped robot that’ll sell for a lot. Unfortunately, she gets a living, self-aware robot instead. And those don’t sell at all.

Beetro is very sweet, very cute. With no memory except “find Galiaro”, he’s curious about everything, and his questions annoy Miree no end. Her scrapper friend, Lucindi, likes him though, and he winds up tagging along, happily helping them out for nothing in return. And if your brain, like mine, has gone “well that’s suspicious as anything”, then you have some great surprises coming your way.

Lucindi is much more relaxed and welcoming. She doesn’t shut herself off from the world, and she shares the little they have with the street rats and the town drunk. She used to be a street kid after all.

Life in Korthe is hard and getting harder. Living will soon become impossible. They live in a cave they dug out of a mound of dirt, planting bushes at its mouth for camouflage. Miree grouches about Lucindi sharing with the street kids (one of whom is named Ribcage), but Lucindi does it anyway.

I want to note some things here about the content. We are told that Lucindi is dark in colour. Miree? Her colour isn’t mentioned. Ditto other characters throughout. So we’re faced with the all-too-common ‘default white’ scenario, which is a shame. Especially when the gender-essentialism rears its head from an old white guy…

While I’m on this, there’s also a fair bit of ableist language in the character dialogue, so be aware of that.

I don’t think any of these things are a conscious bias on the part of the author, though I think he could learn to do better. So I settled it in my head by highlighting certain passages, adding a middle finger emoji as a note, then moving on.

And I'll also give a content warning that the book contains violence which includes imprisonment, murder and torture. It's never a huge section, but it does crop up a few times.

It's a big book (see above, re: epic fantasy space opera), with unexpected hints of magic and queerness (really, it's SO rare to find, and here it is, written well and everything!).

If you like epic fantasy and space opera, robots and world-ending catastrophe, terrible science and street rats with knives - then this is a book for you! And I look forward to the sequel.

When I first checked out the blurb for Dark Theory by Wick Welker, I was looking for a change of pace. Everything I was reading was all romance and fluffy, I just needed something that wasn’t that. I used to really be into Sci-Fi and the lure of ‘A robot yearns to remember. A thief struggles to forget. A galaxy on the verge of collapse’ really sounded like something that would clear my palate. And so, I started reading.

The beginning was kind of slow. Yes, I get it. World building takes time. Introduction also takes time. Here we are introduced to the two main characters. Beetro and Miree. Was not a fan of Miree. At all. And along the way more are brought into the story. And they each all have their own story. Some I found interesting others; did they have any contribution to the story? At one time or another I pretty much disliked an/or liked every character. Some I didn’t know. Others I didn’t care. It’s all going to come together, right. *Shrugs shoulders* But I kept reading.

And reading…

And reading…

I’m five days into the book and undecided if I wanted to continue because it all seemed to drag on. And I was only at 40% of the book. Then I checked. Holy cow! Print length ‏ : ‎796 pages. How did I miss this book was so loooong?! No wonder I felt it was dragging. I needed a break. Honestly, I didn’t know if I was going to continue. So, with a sigh, I tucked Dark Theory away and took a break. For a few weeks. Read a few books in between and scrolling for my next read and decided to pick it back up and see if I could get back into it. The break definitely helped because as soon as I started reading again, well now things perked up for me.

As long and as dragged out the beginning was, the middle to the end more than made up for it. All the pieces come together. It gets more exciting. More intense. More addicting. More epic. Pretty much more everything. So many twists and surprises while all those things that happened in the beginning that I found so pointless, all began to fuse together making this a cohesion of a mind-blowing story come together. Yes, it this is very much worth the read and I find myself ready to find out what happens next.


Stars: 4
I received this book from Netgalley. I was not compensated for the book other than the entertainment it provided. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Wow. Where do I begin this review? I would place this in the New Adult category due to the gore and graphic nature of the story. Take a journey with two main characters while they figure out who they are and what they want their lives to be. This is a futuristic plot where humans and robots live together in a post apocalyptic world and sexuality is fluid. Absolutely great plot and detailed writing. I usually read books in about a week or less, however, this has so much information and plot twists I had to set it down several times. There were times my mind was blown. I read this book in about 4 weeks and I am anxiously anticipating the next book before this one is published!

DNF @ 23%

I was excited to start this book when reading the synopsis. With that being said, there are a few reasons why this enthusiasm did not last and led me to DNF the book. The writing style was not for me and I found it to seem unnatural, especially during dialogues. At almost 200 pages in, I did not care for any of the characters. In fact, Arym’s plot line did not sit well with me at all; I felt very uncomfortable. The length of the book (over 700 pages) was intimidating since I was not enjoying the book. I found the pacing to be a bit off for me as well. It seemed to go a bit slow, and the constant back and forth between the two major story lines confused me; the alternation and slow pace caused me to forget what happened in previous chapters. Just because this book was not for me, does not mean that others will not enjoy it!

Thank you NetGalley for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is a long book, but it didn’t feel like it. It took a few chapters to get started, but after getting blindsided by a particular event, the plot took off and I couldn’t put it down.

It was a dark humored trip down the proverbial yellow brick road with a bizarre lot of characters that you’d never put together. The characters felt that way too about each other, leading to some Douglas Adams moments and my laughter.

The big reveals toward the end weren’t as big to me as the beginning jolt was, but I was fine with that because it was entertaining and wrapped up well. I’m just perturbed that this is book 1 in a series that has a lot of potential and I’m wanting book 2 now!

Thanks to NetGalley and the Independent Book Publishers Association for an ARC of this book.

Science fiction isn't usually my genre but this book cover really intrigued me. I loved this authors way of telling this story. It was captivating and exciting and makes me want to read some more SCI FI. The world is unreal and the characters complimented it so well. This book was engaging from the first chapter which is an instant hit with me.

A futuristic science-fiction entwined with fantasy elements that traces through fiefdoms, robots and multiple perspectives as the last stars of the universe dim-- there's a lot of story in this book.

On the science fiction front, it was interesting to science concepts used in a way that wasn't "hand-wavy" like slapping everything with a "quantum" label. However, the sci-fi rules didn't feel fully established until after an new event happened. This is appropriate for the characters in this post-apocalyptic world as they study the works of an ancient race to piece together cosmic ideas, but it also minimizes the tension about what is or should be expected & possible for the reader.

Given this... density of the subject and hard sci-fi details used, there is a lot to like, but I would have preferred to see this first installment chopped in two to allow characterizations flourish & the world around us. We get good snippets about very distinct places (Cribmen, Junkyard), but this immersion fades as the journey moves onto other locations.

*Thank you NetGalley and publishers for the ARC. All thoughts and opinions are my own*

This book was dense. Enjoyable, but definitely a longer read than I'm used to!

The characters in this book are what kept me reading. We follow Beetro, a robot who was woken up (with no memory) by Miree, a thief hoping for a big score. The setting for this story is a future, somewhat dystopian, society. Together Beetro and Miree set off to help Beetro find answers for his past and for Miree to make some money. They decide to go Ocean's 11 and pull off a heist to steal a single flake of dark matter. In doing so, they discover concerning truths about the universe and what role Beetro may play in this future.

I think the character development and world building were really great. If you enjoy a hard science fiction book, you'll enjoy this one!

First, I have to say this: "Wow, what a ride!"
I originally picked up this book mostly because of the name and the cover (which is simple, but beautiful). And am I glad I did.
While the book is clearly sci-fi, I loved that the author filled it with enough "fantasy-vibes", especially at the beginning, that was able to hold my attention until the plot started moving at full steam.
The characters are intriguing and hold a lot of personality, but the thing that surprised me the most was how they changed with the story. I swear I had the characters "all figured out" around 20% of the book. And then the author surprised me with twists and turns that I didn't see coming and mixed everything up, making me, as a reader, rethink what I knew about the world and characters, but about the plot itself as well. The author didn't shy from doing his best to flesh out the characters.

I will not say much about the plot since, for me, it all worked out because I went completely blind to this. That being said, if you are a fan of more grounded Science Fiction that keeps you on your toes, this is the book for you.

Thank you Wick Welker for this amazing journey and I can't wait to see what you have in store for the sequel!

This book is well written and has an interesting story, but it didn't hold my attention very well. I kept setting it down and picking it up again, but mostly because I felt like I should finish it, not because I wanted to. I think that this book is appealing for many people who are into multi-perspective apocalyptic sci-fi. I always have a difficult time with multiple narrators and sometimes I get invested in one character and that will pull me through, but this switched too often for me to really get a grasp of any one character. I know I am not in the majority here, so I do recommend this book because the writing style is good, it has an interesting setting, and the characters are plentiful and interesting.

It may sound weird that I am recommending this book even though I had a difficult time with it, but it really is an interesting story. I had the same issue with Game of Thrones (the TV show, I'm not sure I want to read the books for the same reason).

This book is EPIC. The scale of this story is huge and complicated but not so complicated that the reader struggles to understand. There’s a lot of science theories packed into this incredible sci-fi adventure and as someone who knows very little about science, I wasn’t lost at all.

The characters are complex, varied and incredibly well-developed. Everyone has their own flaws and weaknesses, desires and strengths. They’re all so incredibly human, even the robot, and I think that’s why I connected so strongly with this story.

Every moment of this book was exciting. It was difficult to want to put down. There were so many twists and turns I didn’t see coming and I loved being surprised by all of them.

I’m desperate to read more of this universe.

My only criticism is that this is listed on NetGalley as LGBT+ and I’m just not sure it is. Miree is possibly queer but one or two vague throwaway lines plus some gay clones that are barely even supporting characters don’t really feel like they lend themselves to qualifying a book as LGBT+. If Miree was explicitly queer then I think it would be fine, but I’m on NetGalley to find queer books, and while this is no doubt an exceptional read that I’m happy to have stumbled across, I feel misled on that front.

When i saw the synopsis i was intrigued by this book

And for the first two chapters it was okay i liked Beetro, and Lucindi was a cool character as well

But i did not like the way this book decided to go. Killing Lucindi off and then have Miree deal with her death like i did not like that at all

Also everyone seemed to hate everyone else and i feel like it did not work. I really did not like the characters

Arym was not it either. I did not like the clones part at all and how incest happens

I was honestly confused the majority of the time and did not pick up what was going on i did not like this at all it was definitely not my cup of tea at all.

I really did try with this one but it did not give what was suppose to give and i felt let down