Book Review: Robopocalypse- Daniel Wilson

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After reading a classic, I let myself relax with a sci-fi book. I listened to Wilson's How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion a few years ago and I didn't love it so I was slow to read his longer, fiction book on a similar topic.
However, this book was really good. I was constantly reminded of the premise of the book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, which I have not read or seen the movie [ although all accounts say the two don't match] where the story is told post-apocalypse. After the war a historian is recounting the tale of the robot uprising and how the humans came to stop it. It is interesting to me because the whole premise is so believable: from the robot that is sentient and unsuccessfully terminated [unlike so many stories where the robot becomes sentient and runs away or takes over right then and there] and escapes its confines [the inventor was wary of it to begin with], to the way the uprising spreads slowly, to the collapse of civilization, the adaptation humans and robots to the new order, and how humans overcame in the end. Furthermore, the history is gathered by a human after the war from a spotty archive that the master robot kept of human heroes because the robots were always interested in studying humans and nature and not necessarily total annihilation of the humans, certainly not of life.
My complaints about the book are minor. The end was unsurprising because of the premise of the book and was not very action based. After having so much good action in the book the end was kind of abrupt and then diplomatic rather than action packed. Next, there is a lot of terminology that almost checked me out at the beginning because the beginning was the end and all of the slang had been established, but not explained. Also, some of the dialogue, especially that of the children in the book, seemed very unrealistic to everyday life. Lastly, the book was setup for a sequel [[book:Robogenesis|18490786]] that came out this year and I can see it going one of two ways [or possibly both together], but the narrative will almost certainly have to be different because another retrospective history would be an odd fit. I hope it doesn't change the storytelling too much though because it was good.

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