4 ideas
In the novel, Victor Frankenstein's reanimation method has been standardised. 'Necroware' installed into dead brains turns corpses into programmable workers, soldiers and servants. Because the dead need no wages, rest or consent, the economy and the military reorganise around them, and the empire's power rests on processing its own dead into labour.
The novel treats the gap between a functioning reanimated body and a living person as a technical question. If motion, obedience and even speech can be installed, then the 'soul' is only what the installed program still fails to reproduce. That turns metaphysics into an engineering boundary that shrinks as the technology improves.
Watson is sent into Afghanistan to find Alexei Karamazov, a Russian who has defected into the mountains with his own army of the dead. Rumour holds that he has gone beyond standard necroware toward corpses capable of thought. The episode shows a state's own tool, taken past its sanctioned limits by one insider, becoming the threat that its intelligence services must hunt down.
Project Itoh died of cancer in 2009, leaving only the opening portion of this novel. His friend Toh EnJoe completed it from that fragment, and it was published in 2012. The book about reviving the dead was itself brought to completion after its author's death by another mind working from his notes.