Robopocalypse

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.