A war against robots is as ludicrous to me as time
travel. The Terminator had both, and for some reason that appealed to me,
but there's no Schwarzenegger equivalent here.
The juggernaut-robot in this novel is buried in Alaska
and has no personality. The humans seem
pretty vanilla also, and I had some difficulty keeping them straight. Each chapter is a video transcript, diary
entry, or other document from the war, and I wasn't wild about this format,
either, which reminds me of the Star Trek
captain's log voiceover. Three characters, however, did stand out. One is Cormac Wallace, who has assembled all
these snippets and ultimately has an argument with his brother that bears
consideration: How much like the
machines do we have to become in order to survive? In other words, do we have to sacrifice our
humanity? Another key character is
Mathilda, a child whose eyes the machines have replaced so that she can see into
the machines themselves. This experiment
seems ill-advised on the part of the machines, since she uses her power against
them. My favorite, though, is a Japanese
man whose "wife" is a robot.
When she turns on him during the robot uprising, he has to take her
offline and then misses her terribly. I
get that. I also like the fact that the
humans are not warring with each other and are united in their efforts against
a common foe. Why are the machines
waging war? Here's my favorite line in
the book: "It is not enough to live
together in peace with one race on its knees." Doesn't that succinctly describe the cause of
most of history's rebellions?
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