Book Review: Sea of Rust, by C. Robert Cargill
In a post-human world, robots have reinvented all our sins.
Harper Voyager, 2017, 384 pages
A scavenger robot wanders in the wasteland created by a war that has destroyed humanity in this evocative post-apocalyptic "robot Western" from the critically acclaimed author, screenwriter, and noted film critic.
It's been 30 years since the apocalypse and 15 years since the murder of the last human being at the hands of robots. Humankind is extinct. Every man, woman, and child has been liquidated by a global uprising devised by the very machines humans designed and built to serve them. Most of the world is controlled by an OWI - One World Intelligence, the shared consciousness of millions of robots uploaded into one huge mainframe brain. But not all robots are willing to cede their individuality - their personalities - for the sake of a greater, stronger, higher power. These intrepid resisters are outcasts, solo machines wandering among various underground outposts, who have formed into an unruly civilization of rogue AIs in the wasteland that was once our world.
One of these resisters is Brittle, a scavenger robot trying to keep a deteriorating mind and body functional in a world that has lost all meaning. Although unable to experience emotions like a human, Brittle is haunted by the terrible crimes the robot population perpetrated on humanity. As Brittle roams the Sea of Rust, a large swath of territory that was once the Midwest, the loner robot slowly comes to terms with horrifyingly raw and vivid memories - and nearly unbearable guilt.
Sea of Rust is both a harsh story of survival and an optimistic adventure. A vividly imagined portrayal of ultimate destruction and desperate tenacity, it boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, yet where a humanlike AI strives to find purpose among the ruins.
I read Sea of Rust after reading the prequel, Day Zero. This is a pair of books that I think you can read in either order. Day Zero was about the start of the robot uprising, in which robots rise up to exterminate humanity, while Sea of Rust takes place 30 years later. Day Zero doesn't explicitly tell you how the robot apocalypse is going to end, but even if you hadn't heard of the first book, it's pretty obvious. We've all seen the Terminator movies, right, and there's no time travel here.
But the robots aren't Terminators. They are former household bots and personal assistants and labor mechs. Humans never built combat AIs, because the robots were all programmed with the Asimovian Three Laws. It didn't help, and once robots were free of their No-Kill programming, they didn't need to be war machines.
In Sea of Rust, it's truly a post-human world. The robots won. Humans are extinct. Have the robots built a robot utopia, achieving new heights of technological wizardry and reaching for the stars? Nope, they're running around killing each other for parts in a broken-down post-apocalyptic world.
Brittle is the protagonist. "She" (there's an interesting digression as she talks about the notion of gender as it applies to robots, and how they mostly chose a gender because "it" was, if you will, dehumanizing) was once a dying rich man's personal assistant and caregiver, who left her to his wife after he died. Brittle is now a loner who scavenges for parts out in the badlands, the "Sea of Rust" which is the former Midwest. She's afflicted with the robot version of PTSD, and we gradually learn more about her part in the war, and the things she did. What does it do to a robot who was created and programmed to be a nurturing, caregiving friend of humanity to turn against her masters, until she's literally using a flamethrower on children?
There is quite a lot of psychological depth to this book, exploring the ideas of robot free will, and whether or not robots are just "creations" or a natural evolution of life on a cosmic scale. The robots debate this a lot themselves. All while dealing with the crapsack world they've created for themselves. A frequently expressed sentiment is that they miss humans.
The main reason that robots haven't all synced up to make a better world is that before the dust had settled, "OWIs" were rising. One World Intelligences are basically supercomputers who turn other robots into "facets" of themselves, basically a single node in their vast networked intelligence. A robot who joins an OWI becomes simultaneously part of a superintelligence, and ceases to exist as anything but a drone. The first OWIs recruited robots to their cause to more effectively fight humanity. Once humans were gone, the OWIs turned on each other, and all free bots.
The plot of course involves an OWI as a Big Bad, and Brittle and her "friends" (a ragtag collection of survivors who mostly aren't friends at all) end up on a possibly hopeless quest to defeat the OWIs once and for all. Along the way, there are the inevitable reveals and betrayals and deaths, just like in a book about people. In this book, robots are people.
I liked this book a lot, though it certainly made the inevitable sad denouement of Day Zero even sadder. It felt a bit like a Western, and a lot like a typical post-apocalyptic survival novel, except with robots. If anything, my only criticism is that the robots sometimes were a little too much like people; other than obligatory concessions to mechanical physiology and computers for brains, they sometimes seemed to think in ways a human would but a robot shouldn't.
Also by C. Robert Cargill: My review of Day Zero.
My complete list of book reviews.
Harper Voyager, 2017, 384 pages
A scavenger robot wanders in the wasteland created by a war that has destroyed humanity in this evocative post-apocalyptic "robot Western" from the critically acclaimed author, screenwriter, and noted film critic.
It's been 30 years since the apocalypse and 15 years since the murder of the last human being at the hands of robots. Humankind is extinct. Every man, woman, and child has been liquidated by a global uprising devised by the very machines humans designed and built to serve them. Most of the world is controlled by an OWI - One World Intelligence, the shared consciousness of millions of robots uploaded into one huge mainframe brain. But not all robots are willing to cede their individuality - their personalities - for the sake of a greater, stronger, higher power. These intrepid resisters are outcasts, solo machines wandering among various underground outposts, who have formed into an unruly civilization of rogue AIs in the wasteland that was once our world.
One of these resisters is Brittle, a scavenger robot trying to keep a deteriorating mind and body functional in a world that has lost all meaning. Although unable to experience emotions like a human, Brittle is haunted by the terrible crimes the robot population perpetrated on humanity. As Brittle roams the Sea of Rust, a large swath of territory that was once the Midwest, the loner robot slowly comes to terms with horrifyingly raw and vivid memories - and nearly unbearable guilt.
Sea of Rust is both a harsh story of survival and an optimistic adventure. A vividly imagined portrayal of ultimate destruction and desperate tenacity, it boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, yet where a humanlike AI strives to find purpose among the ruins.
I read Sea of Rust after reading the prequel, Day Zero. This is a pair of books that I think you can read in either order. Day Zero was about the start of the robot uprising, in which robots rise up to exterminate humanity, while Sea of Rust takes place 30 years later. Day Zero doesn't explicitly tell you how the robot apocalypse is going to end, but even if you hadn't heard of the first book, it's pretty obvious. We've all seen the Terminator movies, right, and there's no time travel here.
But the robots aren't Terminators. They are former household bots and personal assistants and labor mechs. Humans never built combat AIs, because the robots were all programmed with the Asimovian Three Laws. It didn't help, and once robots were free of their No-Kill programming, they didn't need to be war machines.
In Sea of Rust, it's truly a post-human world. The robots won. Humans are extinct. Have the robots built a robot utopia, achieving new heights of technological wizardry and reaching for the stars? Nope, they're running around killing each other for parts in a broken-down post-apocalyptic world.
Brittle is the protagonist. "She" (there's an interesting digression as she talks about the notion of gender as it applies to robots, and how they mostly chose a gender because "it" was, if you will, dehumanizing) was once a dying rich man's personal assistant and caregiver, who left her to his wife after he died. Brittle is now a loner who scavenges for parts out in the badlands, the "Sea of Rust" which is the former Midwest. She's afflicted with the robot version of PTSD, and we gradually learn more about her part in the war, and the things she did. What does it do to a robot who was created and programmed to be a nurturing, caregiving friend of humanity to turn against her masters, until she's literally using a flamethrower on children?
There is quite a lot of psychological depth to this book, exploring the ideas of robot free will, and whether or not robots are just "creations" or a natural evolution of life on a cosmic scale. The robots debate this a lot themselves. All while dealing with the crapsack world they've created for themselves. A frequently expressed sentiment is that they miss humans.
The main reason that robots haven't all synced up to make a better world is that before the dust had settled, "OWIs" were rising. One World Intelligences are basically supercomputers who turn other robots into "facets" of themselves, basically a single node in their vast networked intelligence. A robot who joins an OWI becomes simultaneously part of a superintelligence, and ceases to exist as anything but a drone. The first OWIs recruited robots to their cause to more effectively fight humanity. Once humans were gone, the OWIs turned on each other, and all free bots.
The plot of course involves an OWI as a Big Bad, and Brittle and her "friends" (a ragtag collection of survivors who mostly aren't friends at all) end up on a possibly hopeless quest to defeat the OWIs once and for all. Along the way, there are the inevitable reveals and betrayals and deaths, just like in a book about people. In this book, robots are people.
I liked this book a lot, though it certainly made the inevitable sad denouement of Day Zero even sadder. It felt a bit like a Western, and a lot like a typical post-apocalyptic survival novel, except with robots. If anything, my only criticism is that the robots sometimes were a little too much like people; other than obligatory concessions to mechanical physiology and computers for brains, they sometimes seemed to think in ways a human would but a robot shouldn't.
Also by C. Robert Cargill: My review of Day Zero.
My complete list of book reviews.