Review of Daniel H. Wilson’s “Robopocalypse”
Robopocalypse tells the story of the war between mankind and robots fought in the near future, when a super-intelligent AI goes live and realizes that humanity has served its purpose and is no longer needed in the big scheme of things, and as such is a threat to the rest of creation. The story is told in flashback, with the war already being won by humanity when we read the briefing at the beginning of the book. The story is narrated by Cormac “Bright Boy” Wallace, one of the humans at the final victory of the human race against the AI that tried to do humanity in. The story unfolds in brief vignettes, leading us from the point where Archos, the AI, goes live, takes control of various robots that are a part of our every day lives, and then declares all out war against us. Steven Spielberg will be making a movie of the book in 2013.
This was a fun, easy read that seems like the ideal fit for a Spielberg big budget action movie, and I mean that both in the best and worst ways. Despite being the story of a war-likely the most important war that humanity has ever faced, the cast of characters is extremely limited. Other reviewers have commented that this story reminds them of World War Z from Max Brooks and I see the similarities. That book interviews dozens of survivors of the war against zombies as they tell their tales of the war from start to finish. Robopocalypse shares in that we are given a recounting of the robot war, though the scope here is much more narrow, with perhaps only a handful of characters stepping into the spotlight. In fact, there are some amazing coincidences that keep the cast smaller than it could have been, with a hero of the war in Oklahoma being the father of another major hero of the war who is in Afghanistan. A senator that is a key character just so happens to be the mother of yet another hero in the story. So this story is one that has a very narrow, limited perspective on this particular war. I would have loved to seen a book that was willing to take more of the war and more of the people who experienced it. In addition, I thought there was a lost opportunity when Archos, the diabolical AI we are introduced to at the beginning of the story seems to disappear, for the most part, until the very end of the tale. It was the most intriguing and fun character of them all, a worthy and interesting villain that is woefully underutilized here.
Still, this was a fun, rock ’em, sock ’em tale of humans doing battle with robots that was a quick, easy read. No new ground was broken here, even though the author is a robotics expert. His knowledge added to the quality of the tale, but he challenged none of my expectations when it comes to robots. Instead, this story reminded me of the back story to the Terminator (super military AI wakes up and decides to destroy the human race) or The Matrix (humanity is enslaved by the same machines who they had treated like slaves). Nothing too taxing mentally, but still an entertaining tale.
Robopocalypse can be found here: http://www.amazon.com/Robopocalypse-Novel-Daniel-H-Wilson/dp/0385533853/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302919659&sr=1-1
Review of Ian Woodhead’s “Shades of Green”
Shades of Green tells the story of a small town in England, Holburn, where the world has been turned upside down. A flashback to an experience two brothers had in the woods with more than one mysterious creature before the main story begins introduces us to this tale. After that, the sense of normality we see on the page lasts only a short while before we are exposed to people within the town becoming irrationally violent and several seemingly hallucinogenic trips or dreams intervening in the normal experiences of a few of the different key characters. Soon, it becomes clear that these trippy visions are actually the new state of affairs in Holburn, with a strange mix of science and magic boiling out of the ground and causing the populous to change, to morph into new biological creations. They are changing genetically, with strange creatures and demons being the results of the transitions. A few select people, including Damien and his girlfriend Jen, appear to be immune to these changes, or at least transitioning at a slower rate than everyone else, who are either being sacrificed to the evil forces at work or are working for them. The few survivors are the ones that must get to the bottom of this mystery, which unravels rapidly as the story surges toward its conclusion.
I liked the idea behind this story. It was a strange series of events that often left me puzzled, but intrigued enough to forge ahead to see what might happen next and what might happen at the end of the tale. In all honesty, I’m not sure I quite understood the explanations near the end, or what all happened along the way and the reasons behind them, but once again, this is a hallucinogenic, trippy tale that really would defy a simple explanation no matter how well I tried. The story is gore laced, gooey (a word I use because of the biological emphasis put on the reformation of both the human and animal elements of this town), and eerie, to say the least. I don’t want to spoil things for the readers, but I will say that this story shared elements of some of King’s works laced with a healthy dose of Lovecraftian flavor thrown in for good measure.
The issue I had with Shades of Green was with the editing. Now I will state very clearly that I am not a person who gets upset at typos and even a few contextual errors that show up. I expect that to occur with a self-published work. My belief is that if I can understand what the author was trying to say for the most part, I am good with that. With that said, I feel strongly that Shades of Green could have done with another editing run, because some of the errors left me confused as to the intention of the author at certain points in the book. The errors made this a more challenging read for me. Now this isn’t to say that I didn’t figure things out in the end, or throughout the story, but it slowed things down a bit. I will cite one example of the confusion I faced with the story, and it comes from the very first chapter: Damien and his brother Paul appear to be swapped in the first chapter. If this was the author’s intention as part of a dream sequence, it still left me puzzled and believing that after I had read the next few chapters that it was an error on his part: it was Paul who was having the vision from his past, or a dream, and not Damien. Then again, perhaps that was the author’s intention: to confuse the issue, because that would go along with the rest of the trippy nature of the story. Even so, another editing run through this book would serve it tremendously.
Overall, I enjoyed the concept of this book and I think the author has some wild and disturbing ideas. The editing was where it stumbled for me, but given that this is Ian Woodhead’s first book, I think he has a promising future in writing ahead of him.
Shades of Green can be found at: http://www.amazon.com/Shades-of-Green-ebook/dp/B004E10WCC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1296155046&sr=8-1
My interview on Blog Talk Radio
My interview with Sonar 4 tonight, for those who didn’t get the chance to check it out live.
Lori Titus and Tonia Brown did a great job and it was a lot of fun talking about Comes The Dark, some of my short stories, and the absolutely horrendous book I wrote back in high school that remains locked away forever.
Check it out!
Review of Eric S. Brown and Jessy Marie Robert’s Kinberra Down
Eric S. Brown and Jessy Marie Roberts have created a faced paced and slick little tale of war, aliens, and mayhem that is packed tightly into 80 pages that go by even quicker than you would think. This novella starts out fast, with the Kinberra, a human warship, getting assaulted immediately after coming out of void space into a war zone. Humans and Darians, a cat-like race, are fighting in the system, and before the Kinberra can get annihilated like the rest of their fleet, the ship takes a blind jump into void space…which sends them to a mysterious ice planet with some very dangerous indigenous life forms, where they are forced to crash land and make a desperate attempt to repair their vessel before they get annihilated by the giant ants that swarm the snow drenched planet.
This book barely gives you barely enough time to breath, as we get space battles, hand to hand combat, gruesome ant like enemies, mutiny, and even a bit of a love story jam packed into this very quick read. I devoured this one in one quick sitting and enjoyed it a great deal. This could easily be part of a much bigger saga of the war between the Humans and Darians, and we even get to meet a Darian that is a prisoner aboard the Kinberra, so the reader gets a taste of these enemies and how the fight.
My only real complaint has to be that this book is so brief that we don’t get too much of a chance to really get to know the people involved in this tale in any depth. This is true in particular of Jordon, Rebecca, and Xar, the Darian prisoner who is forced to fight alongside the humans against the menacing ants. I would have liked to seen more of them. This is a brief jaunt into space that gives you action that is fast paced with absolutely no filler, though, which marks it as a blast in my book.
Kinberra Down can be found on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/161706016X/ref=cm_cr_thx_view
“Zombonauts” An anthology by Library of the Living Dead Press
Zombonauts goes where no anthology has gone before. Okay, so I am not 100% sure of that, but I personally haven’t see an entire anthology dedicated to stories about the undead in space. Vince Churchill’s “The Dead Shall Inherit the Earth” was my first exposure to zombies in space, and “Barren Earth” by Eric Brown and Stephen North is a more recent offering, but this jams 30 stories into one book about the undead buggers doing it in zero G.
We get a wide assortment of the undead here and while many are of the traditional Romero variety, there are some very interesting slants on what you would expect when it comes to a zombie story, with voodoo zombies, non-zombies that have zombie-like characteristics, and a few mysteries tossed in that simply make you wonder. The novelty here is not only that all of these stories occur in space, but that we get some very unique tales of apocalypse and even a few bitingly satirical stories as well(pardon the pun).
Given the volume of stories here, there was bound to be a bit of overlap as far as plot and progression with some of them, but there are ample tales that stand up as unique and intriguing in this volume. A true test, in my mind, of a short story is that it leaves me craving for more from that author and more of the particular story I just read. There are several of those here, which makes this anthology not only a unique read but also a very entertaining one.
Zombonauts can be found on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Zombonauts-Undead-Universe-Dr-Pus/dp/1449916147/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274810857&sr=1-1
Review for Derek J. Goodman’s Machina
Derek J. Goodman has crafted four very different and very intriguing fantastical stories about machines that seem to spring straight from his imagination onto the page.
The first, Dea Ex Machina, mixes the grim metallic future of a world filled with humans that are essentially factory slaves, working on machines as if they too are machines, but it also has magic in it as well that goes beyond the simple metal and zombie slave mentality that shackles the workers in place.
The second, a novella, Twister Sisters, was the story I enjoyed the most, more than likely because I have not been exposed to much steam punk and this was a rousing introduction to the genre. The depth of the society the author developed was exceptional. Here we are thrust not only into a world where steam and machines allow humans to take flight in massive contraptions, but also is a place where women, for the most part, rule and men play a secondary role due to their penchant towards violence and machismo. I enjoyed this swashbuckling tale of high adventure and would not mind re-entering that world once again.
Those Were The Days, the third story, was something I, as a kid who grew up on 80s teen and sci fi stories could appreciate. The author’s notes confirmed that he shares similar sentiments with me about movies such as War Games, amongst others. Revisiting and updating a lost tale from the 80s allowed me to grow nostalgic for a story that never actually existed, though it seemed quite familiar to me.
As Wide As The Sky, And Twice as Explosive was the shortest and in some ways, the most interesting of the four stories found in this book. A boy who finds the sky dwelling and warring giant robots far more fascinating and intoxicating than his earth-bound human counterparts is not all that different than things we have seen before, but the extent to which he takes that fascination definitely new. We are given a taste of something that perhaps might leave you wondering where a story like this could lead to if it was expanded, and wondering whether you would be interested in taking such a journey.
Overall, I enjoyed the diversity of machine related stories the author has lined up in this book. I could really get into a larger volume of steam punk either in the world of Twister Sisters or a brand new one from Derek Goodman. I also have a feeling the author has many other worlds he could show us with machines in them that are just as fascinating as the ones he has shown us here.
Machina can be found at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Machina-Derek-J-Goodman/dp/145155351X/ref=cm_cr-mr-title
Patrick D'Orazio's Blog 