Overall review - worth a read
detail - The first 3 books are amazing - page turners, it kinda chugs in parts after that, and books 7-8 have lots of character development that feels unearned.
If you remember TV sitcoms with a A plot and B plot where 90% of a episode is the B plot, and the A plot barely moves… that is the same structure here. The B plot is the dungeon floors and Carl/Princesses adventure.
Thoughts and spoilers on the A plot
The major plot of the book series is the ancient race of the Primals, and learning what happened to them, and how the “system AI” fits into it. We really don’t get this fleshed out at all, it’s quite a mystery box, for the first 8 books. At the end of book 8 there is a 80 page lore dump, and the A plot starts to show itself.
Primal’s got too populated and fought too much, so they philosophically decided to become a hive mind (slowly over generations upon death) and then destroy all life in the universe to reduce suffering (while the AI that runs the hive mind keeps the mind going).
The individual primals were not in agreement on this, and some didn’t want to end all life. They created dueling AIs to keep some life going, or end all life.
That said - Dungeon Crawler Carl book 8 is about the AI running the Dungeon waking up and becoming aware of it’s past and relationship with the other AIs. Quite the existential crisis.
There is some interesting thought in the AI awakening and going through its awkward teenage phase. Lots of almost cosmic horror (the big bad is actually aware of you). There is a smattering of why exist at all if suffering is coupled with existence.
I’m not entirely happy with the A plot, it doesn’t feel super fleshed out. The new race discovering powerful artifacts of a old race are interesting, but the philosophical nihilism built into the crawl and running the “central system AI” is still really vague and not fleshed out to me.
Plus what happened to the hive mind? Where did it go? Did it die in the AI battle over no-life / life?
Tap for spoiler
The Eulogist is the hive mind that was created from most of the primals, and is the sleeping “Macro AI” that gives the central star systems the benefits of living in “Enhancement Zones”. The Apothecary is the rebel that seeded biological life throughout the galaxy, but ended up becoming a Hive mind of her own for reasons we haven’t been told.
Basically, when a dungeon Macro AI is formed, the mantids are siphoning off parts of personalities from the Eulogist and shoving them in a tiny box. I think about it like the TV show Severence, where they are creating building blocks of personalities. That’s the metaphor that Earth’s AI used - the hive mind is like an ocean, and the mantids are taking cups of water out mixed from everyone who joined the hive mind.