If you’ve been reading the blog over the past few weeks, you’ve seen our countdown of best books read this years. Well, like father time, we keep rolling along. Here is our pick for the 6th best book read in 2011.
Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse is being called by some the World War Z of 2011, a science fiction phenomena that could cross over from sci-fi genre fans to the beach reads of a broader reading public.
The comparisons are more than just about marketing buzz, Robopocalypse is World War Z with robots, not zombies. And that is not a bad thing, it’s a structural thing. Just an honest assessment of a book that chronicles the rapid homicidal rise of robots and humanity’s fight back, told in the first person. And like the zombie juggernaut of 2006, Robopocalypse delivers all levels of 21st century pulp.
Wilson has flashes of chilling brilliance amid some familiar science fiction tropes. The snapshots of data, human experiences of terror in the face of unstoppable automaton destruction, crackle with energy and propel the decimation forward.
There are scenes were your skin crawls, most in the early dialogue of the sentient architect of doom Archos 14. That chill is similar to the hyper-intellectual self-aware homicidal thoughts from Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Robopocalyse is not as sprawling as you would think, but a compactly constructed and relatively short chronology of ‘salvaged’ narratives. Characters include a little girl who will become an oracle hybrid for humanity and a reluctant civilian turned continental conquering soldier, among others.
The two stand-out characters of Robopocalypse are a Japanese man, Takeo Nomura, who becomes an almost prophetic uniting shepherd of robots and humans. And there is a U.S. soldier, Specialist Paul Blanton, serving in Afghanistan who witnesses the start of the robot uprising though to its conclusion.
Wilson’s sketch of a late war Blanton reconnaissance mission to a mountainous Afghan lake concludes with a breathtakingly awesome science fiction vision. The scene had a cinematic sweep and awe. We could have read an entire book of Blanton’s accounts in Afghanistan alone!
Robopocalypse owes DNA to 2001: A Space Odessey, the Terminator movie franchise, Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein and any number of ground breaking Japanese manga author/artists like Shirow Masamune and Otomo Katsuhiro.
Robopocalypse stands on the shoulders of generations of sci-fi icons, successfully nurturing the formula, tweaking here and adding there to become a fun, gun blasting, metal crunching man versus machine extravaganza.
Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson was received for free by Boston Book Bums
Like this:
Tags: best books of 2011, book reviews, books of 2011, Robopocalypse review, top ten books of 2011
