New York : Vintage Contemporaries, 2012, c2011.
396 p. ; 21 cm.
Robopocalypse picks up a fairly common theme in popular culture - the specter of intelligent machines turning on their human creators. This has come up in movies such as 2001: a Space Odyssey, The Terminator, and I, Robot. Wilson writes a tense and informed thriller that picks up at the very end of a cataclysmic war where humans have barely managed to defeat machines with AI that have waged a war of extermination against humanity. Following this opening, the rest of the novel is a retelling of the events of the initial machine uprising, the ensuing war, and humanity's success in fighting back. There's a lot of action, exciting plotting, and some gruesome machine-on-human violence (e.g. pluggers - little machines programed to take their sweet, agonizing time boring into humans and drilling away until they reach the heart, where they explode).
Given the exponential growth of computer systems and devices and human dependence on them it is no wonder that people worry about where this technology is taking us. And it's a question that scientists, such as Stephen Hawkings, and institutions like Smithsonian Magazine, take seriously.
If you are looking for a fast-paced, exciting tale of dystopian survival - Wilson scores a home run with his book. With a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon, Wilson writes convincingly of the frightening technological capabilities of interactive machines gone rogue. There are military droids, assassin "smart" cars, drones, and self-replicating/self assembling machines that nearly succeed in wiping humanity from the globe. Given the current life/death dependence of human on digital systems (e.g. energy, transportation, finance, military, etc) and the almost limitless spending on "smart" lethal military machines - there is a lot to think about and ruminate over after reading Wilson's book.
My main complaint with the book is that it reads like the novelization of a movie. Each chapter feels mostly like the set piece of the parts of an action movie - the onslaught, the specific roving bands of survivors, the few "liberated" robots, etc. If you like that style of fiction you will love this novel. And if you don't, but like that kind of movie, hold on, because Robopocalypse - in spite of many delays - is still likely to end up as a blockbuster action movie (probably under the direction of Steven Spielberg).
I'll definitely recommend this book to any students who are looking for an action packed dystopian novel.
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