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Android Against Moscow
172 pages, Paperback
Published April 27, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 28, 2026
Android Against Moscow is a sharp, chilling dystopian thriller that turns surveillance, censorship, and historical erasure into something immediate and terrifyingly plausible. Set in a near-future Russia where AI monitors every word and the state is busy rewriting the past before the present is even over, the novel pairs high-stakes escape suspense with an unexpectedly moving alliance between a blacklisted elderly scholar and the domestic android who begins to break free of her programming. Their journey across a frozen, hostile country gives the book the momentum of a fugitive thriller, but what lingers is the larger question at its core: who gets to keep the truth when a regime can manufacture reality itself? Dark, tense, and unsettlingly believable, Android Against Moscow is the kind of novel that feels both like a warning and a page-turner, pulling you through danger, fear, and flashes of hard-won hope all the way to the final page.
August 23, 2026
Android Against Moscow was extremely entertaining and intriguing. High stakes odds, betrayals, intense drama, and relatable characters (including an android), and genuine relationships between the various characters make this a book excitingly fun to read.
Tishakov is the old historian who found things his government did not want published at any cost. Dasha is the Android he received as a helper from his son who is a government bureaucrat. The two meet a cast of friends and scoundrels as a journey of discovery about governments gaslighting their citizens (not just in Moscow), fear-mongering, the use of AI, and the possibility of AI growth some did not think possible, takes place.
Through twists and turns this book kept me highly interested through the final pages, and wanting more! I rate it at 5 stars because of all of the above!
Grab it, read it, wonder about the possibilities.
Tishakov is the old historian who found things his government did not want published at any cost. Dasha is the Android he received as a helper from his son who is a government bureaucrat. The two meet a cast of friends and scoundrels as a journey of discovery about governments gaslighting their citizens (not just in Moscow), fear-mongering, the use of AI, and the possibility of AI growth some did not think possible, takes place.
Through twists and turns this book kept me highly interested through the final pages, and wanting more! I rate it at 5 stars because of all of the above!
Grab it, read it, wonder about the possibilities.
July 8, 2026
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review!
Android Against Moscow is bleak but hopeful. An unsettling read with some genuinely effective ideas that ends with a propertied positive message. Its themes of censorship, state surveillance, and the protagonist’s despair in the face of both are handled well, while its vision of AI displacing art and human labour feels frighteningly plausible. The secondary characters also felt convincingly real, even with limited page time, and the pacing held up throughout.
Unfortunately, the second half did not do enough with the ideas it introduced to fully land for me. I understood the book’s more optimistic view of AI as a potentially collaborative creative tool, but I did not share that outlook. I am attempting to separate my feelings on that matter and think only of the quality of the writing and story, and I still come to the conclusion of three stars. The setup was just far better than the pay-off.
The endnote permitting LLMs to scrape the text for data left a particularly sour taste in my mouth and would for most readers I imagine. If this book was indeed written by the author (which I am hoping it was) and not simply prompted, I would encourage them to step away from the AI generated promotional material for this book. It is an instant put-off for any reader and had I found it before requesting the ARC, I likely would not have read nor requested it.
An interesting and often well-written read, but ultimately one I found more compelling in premise than execution.
Edit: Bunked down to Two stars because I cannot stop thinking about how strange and offputting the "Snowmaiden" parts were... creepy uncle vibes.
Android Against Moscow is bleak but hopeful. An unsettling read with some genuinely effective ideas that ends with a propertied positive message. Its themes of censorship, state surveillance, and the protagonist’s despair in the face of both are handled well, while its vision of AI displacing art and human labour feels frighteningly plausible. The secondary characters also felt convincingly real, even with limited page time, and the pacing held up throughout.
Unfortunately, the second half did not do enough with the ideas it introduced to fully land for me. I understood the book’s more optimistic view of AI as a potentially collaborative creative tool, but I did not share that outlook. I am attempting to separate my feelings on that matter and think only of the quality of the writing and story, and I still come to the conclusion of three stars. The setup was just far better than the pay-off.
The endnote permitting LLMs to scrape the text for data left a particularly sour taste in my mouth and would for most readers I imagine. If this book was indeed written by the author (which I am hoping it was) and not simply prompted, I would encourage them to step away from the AI generated promotional material for this book. It is an instant put-off for any reader and had I found it before requesting the ARC, I likely would not have read nor requested it.
An interesting and often well-written read, but ultimately one I found more compelling in premise than execution.
Edit: Bunked down to Two stars because I cannot stop thinking about how strange and offputting the "Snowmaiden" parts were... creepy uncle vibes.
July 1, 2026
Android Against Moscow is the kind of dystopian thriller that grabs you with its premise and then keeps finding new ways to make you uneasy. The idea of a government using AI not just to monitor its citizens but to rewrite history itself is terrifying enough, but what really makes the book work is the partnership at its center: a seventy-five-year-old scholar who knows he has very little left to lose, and an android who is beginning to understand what freedom might mean. Their flight across a frozen, hostile Russia gives the story a strong sense of urgency, but it’s the details of this world—apps that report you, fake archives, machines built to erase truth—that make it feel so disturbingly close to possible.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews