[amazon_link id=”0385533853″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ][/amazon_link]Note: This review first ran 6/8/11 in SFSignal.

Scientists have a grand tradition of turning from writing academic papers to science fiction to transmit their manifestos from the ivory tower to the tech-savvy populace…and beyond. Daniel Wilson has been easing into sf with a string of books about the future, including Where’s My Jetpack?, a look at what happened to the future of sf’s golden age, and the very well-received How to Survive the Robot Uprising.

Wilson’s current book makes no attempt to hide its identity as the latter title, rebooted with 100% more characters, plot, and action. Well, maybe with 50% more of each. Despite Steven Spielberg’s excitement and affection for the book’s prospect as his next feature roboblockbuster, Robopocalypse is short on story, as well as being something of a disappointment as a work of hard sf.

The robo-tech is respectable, as one would expect from someone who just earned his Ph.D. from the United States’ most prestigious robotics school, Carnegie Mellon. But the scenario is weak compared to the story’s predecessors, including Hal’s rampage in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Colossus’ blackmail of the human race in Colossus: The Forbin Project and the benevolent cybergun held to our head in Rob Sawyer’s recent Webmind series. None of which are robot stories…but really, neither is this.

Instead, it’s an emergent AI story with robotic peripherals strewn about the landscape, which is admittedly a new wrinkle on an old dog,  but it undermines the value of the narrative. As the jacket blurb says, “People should know that at first the enemy looked like everyday stuff; cars, buildings, phones, planes…” and robots, industrial, personal, and military. Elsewhere on the jacket the author is compared to Michael Crichton, specifically for Andromeda Strain, which is apt. Both authors’ mission is to breathe life into a new techno-bogyman and scare the masses.

It’s interesting that the author goes with the AI-takes-over-everything theme, when the real danger will be in malware loaded into smart devices, both as pranks and as genuinely malicious acts. Don’t be be too surprised when your Roomba(tm) starts regurgitating dirt in jihadic verse. Asimov’s three laws are as fanciful as any other device in sf, but they’d be really, really useful about now.

There actually is a robot uprising in the book, but ironically, it’s against the AI that’s subverted all of robodom against humankind.

The novel, such as it is, starts “twenty minutes after the end of the war,” as the narrator, Cormac “Bright Boy” Wallace, tells us (we won, btw). The first chapter telegraphs the setup; an AI named Archos holed up in a cavern created by a remote underground nuclear test in Alaska, took control of all the robots and automated devices in the world and systematically wiped out the bulk of humanity, starting in the urban centers and moving out into the countryside.  Rooting around in the ruins, Cormac’s squad finds the “black box” of the war:  a collection of multimedia records of the mostly-human actions in the war, carefully preserved by Archos. Bright Boy decides that it’s a story worth telling, even though he’s not keen to relive it, so he sets out to capture it in words.

All in all, Robopocalypse reads more like a collection of short stories than a novel.  In a way, the setup reminds me of the intro to Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, where we look into the tattoos and they become animated stories. But here there’s an overarching story, with a recurring set of characters.

Some of those characters make only a single walk-on, but a core group emerges fairly quickly:  Cormac; his brother Jack and their squad; Mathilda Perez, daughter of a Senator who became aware of the robot danger earlier than most; and Lurker, a teenage “phone-phreak (hacker)” that accidentally traces Archos to his lair and then turns his talents from taunting people to protecting humanity. There’s also Takeo Namura, a Japanese robot mechanic that loves the machines deeply, so deeply that they wind up returning the affection. And the Osage Nation, a Native American enclave in Oklahoma, which becomes a character in its own right, and the core of the human resistance.

So the story isn’t as fragmented as it might have been, but rather, it’s distributed across a wide geographical space, and the actors assemble into a virtual community, communicating through human social networks and cyberspace, each contributing a piece of the puzzle that allows us to defeat Archos.

Archos makes it clear, in an inconsistent sort of clarity, that he doesn’t want to wipe out humanity. He wants robokind and humankind to live together in peace, without robots as second class citizens, or worse. Though he’s vastly brighter than a human, being the author’s idea of a Vingian singularity intelligence, he never seems to consider manipulating public opinion rather than wiping the bulk of humanity off the face of the planet. Archos, possibly inheriting the trait from its creator, author Wilson, suffers from profound social blindness. The AI, at the very least, could take some tips from Rob Sawyer’s WWW:Wonder on how to make friends and influence humans.

Ultimately, what bothers me about the story isn’t the fragmentation, technology, or tone, all of which are moderately well handled. Nor is it that the author is covering ground that others have pretty well trampled over the last century, essentially retelling the story which introduced the term “robot” to us: R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), written by Czech author Karel Čapek and  published in 1920. Stories need to be made fresh for new generations, and made relevant to new times, and that’s clearly what the author is doing here.

What bothers me is the ineptitude of the robot hordes and how easily they’re defeated by the ad hoc army of survivors. When our future robot masters do rise up against us, don’t expect it to be so easy.

Links / Sources:

• [amazon_link id=”1596911360″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Where’s My Jetpack?[/amazon_link]
• Review: Where’s My Jetpack, SFRevu April, 2007
• [amazon_link id=”1582345929″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]How To Survive The Robot Uprising[/amazon_link]
• Rossum’s Universal Robots: English Translation by David Wyllie