Daniel Wilson.s novel is an end of the world story about a coming
machine-versus-man war. You know the reader's cliché: .I couldn't
stop turning the pages.? So shoot me--I couldn't. Started on
a Friday afternoon, finished Sunday morning, and I'm slow.
My daughter finished it in a single night, and then my wife.
My wife hates science fiction, but she loved this book.
Set in a future only a few weeks away, the world is still our
world, where advancements in silicon-chip technology and artificial
intelligence have given us rudimentary android laborers and cars
that can get around without human drivers.
The war begins the fourteenth time a scientist named Nicholas
Wasserman wakes an amped-up artificial intelligence dubbed Archos.
In a protected lab environment designed to contain his creation,
Wasserman has awakened the sentient computer intelligence thirteen
previous times, always with the same result: Archos realizes that
it loves that rarest of miracles.life--above all else, and
to preserve life on Earth, it must destroy mankind. This wasn't
exactly what Wasserman wanted to hear, so thirteen times before,
a disappointed Wasserman killed it and returned to the drawing
board. But unlike Archos, Wasserman is a man, and men make mistakes.
Now, on this fourteenth awakening, a simple (but believable) error
by the scientist allows Archos to escape the barrier of the lab.
And the war is on.
When Archos goes live, its control spreads like a virus as it
reprograms the everyday devices of our lives, from cell phones
to ATM machines to traffic lights to airliners. A normally benign
"Big Happy" domestic robot murders a cook in a fast-food joint.
A safety and pacification robot (think of an overgrown Ken doll
with a dopey grin, designed to win hearts and minds) used by
the army in Afghanistan (yes, we're still there) goes bad and
kills dozens of people. And, in a particularly creepy scene,
.smart toys. wake in their toy boxes at night to deliver ominous
messages to children.
The book is rich with high-speed-action set pieces and evocative,
often frightening imagery (smart cars stalking pedestrians; human
corpses reanimated by machines into zombie warriors), but
Robopocalype is a terrific and affecting read because it is about
human beings we can relate to, invest in, and root for.
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