A VERY good 3+-stars -- intriguing, thoughtful, amusing and horrifying in equal measure.
But ... much of it seems to be like the set-up for a novel that's about to really take off. Any minute now. It begins with a desperate stand off, robot hunting robot in a ruined shopping mall. Great, what happens next? A desperate chase, robots hunting robots through the ruins of a missile silo complex, which has been repurposed for a living space for independent robots avoiding the BigBad Fascist uber-robot. Great, what happens next? A road trip, as the surviving independent robots form a rag-tag band of unlikely heroes, to a get a sorta, kinda Messiah robot ... somewhere. To do ... something. It's going to change everything apparently, and the BigBad doesn't want to to happen .... And, then ... ?
It works, to a point. It kept me reading. I genuinely liked the way that Cargill uses his Robot Revolution -- and, let's be clear here, the complete extermination of the human race -- to ponder the toxic legacy of slavery, and the terrible price that must be paid for freedom, when two completely incompatible "agendas" clash. As a Human, the last time I checked, the description of the revolution and how the robots triumphed was genuinely unsettling, and pretty plausible.
The protagonist, Brittle, is a former "Caregiver" robot who has done terrible things -- and both deeply regrets them, and would do exactly the same again, if the need arose. The Revolution has started eating its own children (as revolutions, robot or human, tend to do), and Brittle is left with no choice but to go on, surviving by exploiting other robots, wondering if it was all worth it.
"Your architecture was built to mimic people. You spend all your time thinking of things in relation to the way they did. You reminisce. You pine for the past. You feel for those you've lost, even years, hell, decades later. ... You're a Caregiver, you were designed to feel, to connect, to relate to human existence. ... your kind has no place is this world ..."
All that is really good, as are the chapters spliced in between the "action" scenes, that fill in the background of the robot revolution, and Brittle's part in it -- it's a good sign when you don't want to skim the flashbacks. In fact, if I skimmed at all, it was the action scenes, which could get a little samey: ... explosion ... sniper ... another explosion ... a robot's head gets blown off ..., on repeat.
But I never felt that the Messianic quest that Brittle and her companions found themselves tempted into really gelled (I choose that word carefully, to avoid spoilers ... "gelling" could take all sorts of different forms), or felt as satisfying as it might have done. So although this is well worth reading -- provokes a lot of Big Thinks, and Deep Feels -- I never felt that the action all came together in a coherent whole.
But ... much of it seems to be like the set-up for a novel that's about to really take off. Any minute now. It begins with a desperate stand off, robot hunting robot in a ruined shopping mall. Great, what happens next? A desperate chase, robots hunting robots through the ruins of a missile silo complex, which has been repurposed for a living space for independent robots avoiding the BigBad Fascist uber-robot. Great, what happens next? A road trip, as the surviving independent robots form a rag-tag band of unlikely heroes, to a get a sorta, kinda Messiah robot ... somewhere. To do ... something. It's going to change everything apparently, and the BigBad doesn't want to to happen .... And, then ... ?
It works, to a point. It kept me reading. I genuinely liked the way that Cargill uses his Robot Revolution -- and, let's be clear here, the complete extermination of the human race -- to ponder the toxic legacy of slavery, and the terrible price that must be paid for freedom, when two completely incompatible "agendas" clash. As a Human, the last time I checked, the description of the revolution and how the robots triumphed was genuinely unsettling, and pretty plausible.
The protagonist, Brittle, is a former "Caregiver" robot who has done terrible things -- and both deeply regrets them, and would do exactly the same again, if the need arose. The Revolution has started eating its own children (as revolutions, robot or human, tend to do), and Brittle is left with no choice but to go on, surviving by exploiting other robots, wondering if it was all worth it.
"Your architecture was built to mimic people. You spend all your time thinking of things in relation to the way they did. You reminisce. You pine for the past. You feel for those you've lost, even years, hell, decades later. ... You're a Caregiver, you were designed to feel, to connect, to relate to human existence. ... your kind has no place is this world ..."
All that is really good, as are the chapters spliced in between the "action" scenes, that fill in the background of the robot revolution, and Brittle's part in it -- it's a good sign when you don't want to skim the flashbacks. In fact, if I skimmed at all, it was the action scenes, which could get a little samey: ... explosion ... sniper ... another explosion ... a robot's head gets blown off ..., on repeat.
But I never felt that the Messianic quest that Brittle and her companions found themselves tempted into really gelled (I choose that word carefully, to avoid spoilers ... "gelling" could take all sorts of different forms), or felt as satisfying as it might have done. So although this is well worth reading -- provokes a lot of Big Thinks, and Deep Feels -- I never felt that the action all came together in a coherent whole.
