Will Sargent reviewed The Mechanical by Ian Tregillis (Alchemy wars -- Book one)
"The Clakker: a mechanical man, endowed with great strength and boundless stamina -- but beholden …
Review of 'The Mechanical' on 'Storygraph'
4 stars
Pretty great. The steampunk premise is not nearly as important as the AI question. Which is “what if the only way we could get AI to work for us would be to have another program torture them until they did what we say?”
The resulting society and underclass and uprising writes itself. Pretty neat.