Daniel H. Wilson, Robopocalypse

[sanguinity]

25. Daniel H. Wilson, Robopocalypse.

As one might expect from the name on the tin, more or less the Terminator franchise (but without the time travel), updated for the 2010s. Horror and SF both, written by a guy who has a Ph.D. in robotics. Consequently, the part of my brain that is usually saying, "Pfft, this is ridiculously implausible, haha," was instead saying, "Auuughgh no no no no too-plausible stopit stop!" and looking for something to hide under.

(The first third, when Archos / Skynet is putting in place its opening gambits for Zero/Judgment Day, freaked me so badly that I had to take it one chapter at a time. Of course, I haven't read horror since junior high and thus might be more freakoutable than you. But still. I've been giving my darling pet Roomba suspicious looks lately. The microwave, too.)

The book is highly episodic, relating key incidents of the war via archived documents, CCTV footage, survivor accounts, and the like. Many characters appear only once (in other words, many characters die horribly on their first appearance), but we do get repeated encounters with many people who play pivotal roles in the resistance. Among them: the tribal police of the Osage Nation, Iraqi insurgents, a Japanese factory technician, Brooklyn construction workers, and the 12yo daughter of a U.S. Congresswoman. I adored this slate of heroes, I did.

The book is fairly strongly U.S.-normed, which bugged me a bit. Key parts of the resistance occur in Iraq, Japan, England, and the U.S.; while that's nominally a global list, it still felt a bit too much like "parts of the world that the U.S. notices". Throughout the book, I wondered what Zero Day and the following war had looked like in less wealthy nations (or, in the case of Iraq, nations that weren't already pumped full of U.S. military devices), but I never got an answer to that. Additionally, Zero Day itself was scheduled for the U.S.'s Thanksgiving weekend, apparently for strategic reasons. It is unclear why a single nation's holiday weekend should be that important: after all, if you wait a month and aim for Christmas, far more people, in far more countries, will be off their game. I can come up with some post-hoc explanations of the focus on U.S. Thanksgiving (the most convincing of which is that Archos's hardware resides in the U.S., and thus it's important to decisively gut U.S. capacity for resistance), but really, it mostly just felt like the author was an American.

Altogether, however: it was an engaging read, I loved the heroes, I loved the SF-nal speculations and counter-speculations, and my brain has been having quite the lovely time fiddling around in this world. Well, when my brain hasn't been creeped out of its skull, that is. But that can be its own kind of lovely, too...

(Additional tags: cherokee author, science fiction, horror)

Comments

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

Hm, I'd actually abandoned this book halfway through (something I rarely do) - partially because of what I considered serious voice issues in the first-person testimonies but also because I was frustrated with the seemingly contradictory technology (I went in thinking it was going to be set just a little in the future of our timeline, but then the robot servants were sprung on me, and then we're back to phreakers, but for some reason everyone has cell phones...) Now I'm tempted to pick it up again, however. Are things cleared up more in the second half?

[sanguinity]

I have the impression that we're talking a decent chunk more than five years out: humanoid robot cleaners, highly functional robot military police, cars that drive themselves have become default in the U.S. But not so far out that other stuff, such as cell phones, are not still recognizably themselves. However, after toying with trying to estimate the dates, I put that issue aside, especially since I don't believe we're much good at saying what will and won't be possible, practical, or ubiquitous beyond ten years out or so. (And then once the war is on, all bets are off, in terms of technological predictions.) Myself, I was more interested in the speculation about what would be effective strategy and counter-strategy, given certain kinds of tech, access, and infrastructure, rather than what year we'd be seeing all of these kinds of tech happening at the same time.

So, no, you're probably not going to get a satisfactory answer to your question.

You think cell phones will be going away by the time we have self-driving cars and multi-purpose robot cleaners?

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

You think cell phones will be going away by the time we have self-driving cars and multi-purpose robot cleaners?

No, what I meant was that there's that section where hacking is presented as early 1990s-style phreaking - carried out by phone lines, having to place a call to get an IP address - but everyone in a later scene of that section have cell phones. It was an odd combination of eras that I couldn't quite make sense of.

It was also jarring to suddenly see the robot servants when the premise had been set up that the attacks originally came from "cars, buildings, phones, planes," and it seemed insinuated if not outright stated that the actual robots were self-made after an attack through more mundane devices. (I wonder now if the early sections weren't from an earlier draft?)

So it's not the inclusion of these servants that I found implausible in terms of setting it in the near future, but to me, their existence wasn't established early enough to come as anything but a surprise, which then made me wonder if the author was just being sloppy (which the voice issues in the first-person made me lean towards) or setting up some sort of clever twist.

[sanguinity]

Ah, I misunderstood, thanks. I know squat-all about hacking and phreaking, so I wouldn't have caught that.

I don't have my copy at hand, but in the initial framing piece (where the narrator finds the archive), the narrator says the attack began with toaster ovens, does he not? And one of the very first attacks in the book (the second one, I think) was by a robot butler fetching takeaway.

In the second phase of the war, Archos shifts to relying more on modified robot designs of the human militaries: while domestic appliances (including cars) had been usefully well-deployed among human populations, they were also heavily infrastructure-dependent, and humans had been exploiting that dependency. By the end of the book, Archos is designing and building its own military robots from scratch -- there are several segments about humans discovering research labs, and realizing just how effective Archos is about to get. Early, crude models of Archos's third phase appear in the prologue/framing piece.

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the additional info. I might well read it the rest of the way when I'm finished with a few other books I've got on the go.

And actually, looking into it, I'm guessing that hacking scene was taken from a real incident in 2005. I think it may just be a case where the author knows whenabouts it's set but doesn't think about how his cues are coming off to an uninformed reader.

That first attack scene was actually where the book started to lose me. It may have been fairly early, but to me, it was still too late to radically shift my perception of the setting for no discernible reason. It also epitomizes what I think is the author's main weakness. Wilson is very good at writing engagingly in the first person present, but while that works for immediate narration like in the first section, he doesn't alter it to fit other media. You get a certain amount of leeway with fictional people being much more eloquent than real people, but there's a limit to my believability when people are giving a spoken police statement or legal testimony as though they're penning a thriller.