Robopocalypse
Ratings99
Average rating3.6
this review seems to justify
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/139051483?book_show_action=true
Do you often feel like computers have it in for you? Do you fear that the more technology advances, the more it's going to take over our lives? I don't really share those sentiments, but after reading Daniel H. Wilson's novel Robopocalypse, I did start to look at all the gadgetry in my daily life and think about what would happen if they turned against us. In this book, the story is broken into a large number of diverse storylines and time periods all centred around the moment that a massive artificial intelligence called “Archos” takes over all the robots in the world (and in this world, civilization has advanced enough to have all kinds of different robots around). The first few chapters read like an anthology of various incidents that foreshadow the rise of the machines: from the violent attack of a domestic service robot in a frozen yogurt shop, to the creepy and threatening words of a child's electronic dolls. These early episodes set the groundwork for the rest of the novel which jumps from one character's situation to the next as humans are defeated, then rise up against the robots that threaten to destroy their entire race.
As you might imagine, there's a bit of a military overtone to a lot of the chapters. Some of the narrators are members of the military or militia, and of course the whole context of the novel is a human-robot war, so there are going to be battle scenes and battle language. Unfortunately I don't really enjoy military narration. Often writers try hard to express a military character's persona by making them very gruff, loud, or simplistic in their sense of right and wrong. There is a single, overall narrator named Cormac Wallace who comments on each of the other sub-narrators and though he wasn't originally in the military, he led the militia group who ended up defeating Archos, so his developed “roughneck”-style voice is throughout. While the other characters vary widely in demographics, one of the deficiencies of this book is that they start to sound a bit too similar in tone. The child characters don't really speak like children. Their descriptions and accounts of their remembered thoughts don't use language that necessarily fit what they're supposed to be (these narrations supposedly come from the characters either personally recounting their anecdotes or surveillance from robots who've recorded events with their sensors). The language seems like a novel, and a verbose one at that. For example, here's a gruesome account of a man being attacked by robots:
Tiberius is heaving, muscles spasming, kicking up clumps of bloodstained snow. Mist pours off his sweating 250-pound frame as the East African thrashes violently, flat on his back. He's the biggest, most fearless grunt in the squad, but none of that matters when a glinting nightmare flashes out of the swirling snow and begins eating him alive.
This is my 2nd time reading this after reading it as a teen, and it's... interesting, for sure. It's as emotionally arresting as I remember (though that's definitely tinged with nostalgia goggles), and it's also less... racially sensitive than I remember, certainly. The Indigenous characters are clearly well-researched in the sense that Wilson looked up the Osage nation, but otherwise read like Noble S/v/ges mixed with cowboys in a way I found good-faith unsettling. The older Japanese man, Nomura... well, the orientalism in this is settled and comfortable in its nonsense. I can look past it because so little time is spent with Nomura and ultimately it seems like Wilson forgets by the latter third of the novel that his Indigenous characters are Indigenous, but it definitely is different than I remember. And the work camps... I did not remember those at all, just to level.
Ultimately, this is World War Z with robots and with significantly less awful HIV-metaphors, but significantly more weird Holocaust-metaphors, so YMMV.
It's told as a series of reports on events that led up to the conclusion of a great fight between humans and robots. You kind of have to remember these as a person described in chapter 3 might show up in important ways in chapter 15.
It was a little irritating that, after telling the story of that chapter, the narrator would comment that, later, this event would lead to this person saving all mankind or something.
Some of the stories, especially the airplane story, were quite terrifying.
All in all, I thought it was well thought out and there were several surprising twists.
It starts with the ending, has some pretty good horror elements and descriptions, anticlimactic ending. The concept is good but at times the characters were a little flat.
DNF at 24%
I got bored reading so many disconnected stories leading up to the robot apocalypse/war. Just get to it already. The individual stories are interesting, but how freaking many are there and I'm only 24% in? Not fast paced enough to keep me hooked.
You know I love sci-fi and that I love apocalyptic stories so I was excited when this book came in to the library for me. It's not a great book and certainly not a prime example of the end-of-the-world genere, but it's a quick, easy read and the author goes a few extra steps to try and explain why the super-smart AI that causes all the problems got out of control. In other words, it's not just the hubris of man thinking he can keep an AI under control.My problem with this book is that the story is told as a historical account of the war which is a method I've most recently seen done in [b:World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War 8908 World War Z An Oral History of the Zombie War Max Brooks http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320398267s/8908.jpg 817], a seriously great book that accounts for the war against the zombies extremely well. Robopocalypse, unfortunately, tries to follow a similar pattern, but leaves one with only the faintest sketch of characters. I had no real emotion for any of them after I was through.Still, an entertaining and quick read.
I found it very similar to World War Z in its structure and execution of the shory.
Simply. I found the way the story was told to be a little odd, but really helped to paint a good picture.
I found myself often wondering about the events while not even reading the book. That to me says I enjoyed it (and was a little weirded out as the events were very plausible from my point of view)
Similar enough to “World War Z” that you could call it “World War R”. In spite of that, it's a pretty fantastic book. I had to force myself to put it down and go to sleep one night and I wanted to get through it so much that I blew part of a work day finishing the last 25%.
I think Io9.com put it best when they called it the summer's best movie - in book form. Daniel H. Wilson thanks Dreamworks in the Acknowledgements and IMDB already has Steven Spielberg attached to the project. You can't help but cast the protagonists in your mind and it reads like a script. Therein lies my biggest complaint. Daniel H. Wilson writes in the first person as each chapter jets you around the world from protagonist to protagonist. Unfortunately the 12 year old speaks in the same writerly tones as the construction grunt or the aged Japanese tinkerer.
Still it's a compelling read and only the end lacks the theatric oomph I was hoping for, finishing with a whimper instead of a bang. Still you can't help but see each action packed set piece laid out in cinematic form and drool at the prospect of this being turned into a movie. This could be a unique case where the movie will surpass the source material.
Now I know how to survive the Robot apocalypse. Story bogged down in places with less than stellar writing, but all in all a good beach read.