{"id":2040,"date":"2011-07-07T19:17:08","date_gmt":"2011-07-08T00:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.e357.net\/beingernest\/?p=2040"},"modified":"2024-02-14T14:29:57","modified_gmt":"2024-02-14T19:29:57","slug":"again-the-robot-revolution-robopocalypse-by-daniel-h-wilson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/again-the-robot-revolution-robopocalypse-by-daniel-h-wilson\/","title":{"rendered":"Again, The Robot Revolution: Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson"},"content":{"rendered":"

[amazon_link id=”0385533853″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]\"Robopocalypse:[\/amazon_link]Note: This review first ran 6\/8\/11 in SFSignal.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2026and beyond. Daniel Wilson has been easing into sf with a\u00a0string of books about the future, including Where\u2019s My Jetpack?<\/strong>, a look at what happened to the future of sf\u2019s golden age, and the very well-received How to Survive the Robot Uprising<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Wilson\u2019s 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\u2019s excitement and affection for the book\u2019s prospect as his next feature roboblockbuster, Robopocalypse<\/strong> is short on story, as well as being something of a disappointment as a work of hard sf.<\/p>\n

The robo-tech is respectable, as one would expect from someone who just earned his Ph.D. from the United States\u2019 most prestigious robotics school, Carnegie Mellon. But the scenario is weak compared to the story\u2019s predecessors, including Hal\u2019s rampage in 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/strong>, Colossus\u2019 blackmail of the human race in Colossus: The Forbin Project<\/strong> and the benevolent cybergun held to our head in Rob Sawyer\u2019s recent Webmind<\/em> series. None of which are robot stories\u2026but really, neither is this.<\/p>\n

Instead, it\u2019s an emergent AI story with robotic peripherals strewn about the landscape, which is admittedly a new wrinkle on an old dog,\u00a0 but it undermines the value of the narrative. As the jacket blurb says, \u201cPeople should know that at first the enemy looked like everyday stuff; cars, buildings, phones, planes\u2026\u201d and robots, industrial, personal, and military. Elsewhere on the jacket the author is compared to Michael Crichton, specifically for Andromeda Strain<\/strong>, which is apt. Both authors\u2019 mission is to breathe life into a new techno-bogyman and scare the masses.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019t be be too surprised when your Roomba(tm) starts regurgitating dirt in jihadic<\/em> verse. Asimov\u2019s three laws are as fanciful as any other device in sf, but they\u2019d be really, really useful about now.<\/p>\n

There actually\u00a0is<\/em> a robot uprising in the book, but ironically, it\u2019s against the AI that\u2019s subverted all of robodom against humankind.<\/p>\n

The novel, such as it is, starts \u201ctwenty minutes after the end of the war,\u201d as the narrator, Cormac \u201cBright Boy\u201d 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.\u00a0 Rooting around in the ruins, Cormac\u2019s squad finds the \u201cblack box\u201d of the war:\u00a0 a collection of multimedia records of the mostly-human actions in the war, carefully preserved by Archos. Bright Boy decides that it\u2019s a story worth telling, even though he\u2019s not keen to relive it, so he sets out to capture it in words.<\/p>\n

All in all, Robopocalypse reads more like a collection of short stories than a novel.\u00a0 In a way, the setup reminds me of the intro to Bradbury\u2019s\u00a0The\u00a0Illustrated Man<\/strong>, where we look into the tattoos and they become animated stories. But here there\u2019s an overarching story, with a recurring set of characters.<\/p>\n

Some of those characters make only a single walk-on, but a core group emerges fairly quickly:\u00a0 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 \u201cphone-phreak (hacker)\u201d that accidentally traces Archos to his lair and then turns his talents from taunting people to protecting humanity. There\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

So the story\u00a0isn’t\u00a0as fragmented as it might have been, but rather, it\u2019s\u00a0distributed <\/em>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\u00a0us<\/em> to defeat Archos.<\/p>\n

Archos makes it clear, in an inconsistent sort of clarity, that he doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s vastly brighter than a human, being the author\u2019s 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<\/strong> on how to make friends and influence humans.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, what bothers me about the story isn\u2019t 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:\u00a0R.U.R. (Rossum\u2019s Universal Robots)<\/em><\/strong>,<\/strong> written by Czech author Karel \u010capek and\u00a0 published in 1920. Stories need to be made fresh for new generations, and made relevant to new times, and that\u2019s clearly what the author is doing here.<\/p>\n

What bothers me is the ineptitude of the robot hordes and how easily they\u2019re defeated by the ad hoc army of survivors. When our future robot masters do rise up against us, don\u2019t expect it to be so easy.<\/p>\n

Links \/ Sources: <\/strong><\/p>\n