Sea of Rust

It was lighter than I thought, action packed, western vibes and sometimes it felt like Mad Max but with robots. Good read indeed.

This book reads a lot like the novelization of an unproduced screenplay. You’ve got post-apocalyptic sci-fi about a misanthropic robot who helped exterminate humanity wrapped up in a road movie punctuated with firefights and explosions. None of the characters are particularly pleasant or sympathetic, but they are at least sort of interesting. I never believed for a minute that they sounded like robots, though. They’re constantly foul-mouthed, sarcastic and quippy, and they mostly just feel like humans verbally sparring in a nineties B picture. Compare that to Martha Wells’ Murderbot series, which features a main character who feels just inhuman enough that you believe them as an AI construct, but so compelling that you completely buy into their character. This book was action-packed, and I did generally enjoy reading it, but I felt like the characters never redeemed themselves, and the setting and tone wore out their welcome.

** spoiler alert ** This book didn't work for me. :( It felt to me like The Terminator movies from the robots' point of view, crossed with a little Mad Max, with a small seasoning of wise-cracking noir-type characters. Basic plot: sentient robots decide they're the next stage in human evolution, destroy all humans, set out to make an ideal robot world, and fail at that because giant AIs battle each other. O.o I just didn't buy it. Well, I can see sentient robots killing off humans who were threatening to shut them down. But the rest of it? Not so much. Earth is totally trashed, but there are still resources for the factories churning out the vast amounts of ammo and batteries for plasma weapons that the remnants seem to need? (see: Mad Max-like scenarios, complete with crazed individuals holed up in compounds.) Lots of scavenging of failing robots takes place. I skimmed through a fair amount of it because I didn't care enough about what was happening to read closely. OTOH, I DID read to the end. So 2 stars instead of 1. I'm probably just not the target audience for this book.

Probably, if honest, a 4.6, so it gets the 5 :) This was a weird one. I see that some other reviewers started off loving it but then drifted out of it. I was the opposite. I found the "i'm a robot but for all intents and purposes I am speaking like a person" narrative odd, and didn't quite buy into it at first. Well to be honest I never really did 100%, but i stopped caring. I bought into it enough, and as the story unfolded and the world building got fleshed out it made more sense. I would say the best feeling I got from this is that it was like playing a really good DLC for Fallout New Vegas, where you are a robot cowboy, with some Mad max stuff thrown in for good measure.