So this week I was reading Robopocalypse, by Daniel H. Wilson, a book about the aftermath of the impending robot/AI uprising, which maybe you’ve heard people worrying about lately.
Now, although it may seem like a spoiler to open with what happens after the robot uprising ends, this is the very beginning of the book. So, um, I guess the humans win. Go us!
Twenty minutes after the war ends, I’m watching stumpers pour up out of a frozen hole in the ground like ants from hell and praying that I keep my natural legs for another day.
Each walnut-sized robot is lost in the mix as they climb over each other and the whole nightmare jumble of legs and antennae blends together into one seething, murderous mass.
With numb fingers, I fumble my goggles down over my eyes and get ready to do some business with my little friend Rob, here.
It’s an oddly quiet morning. Just the sigh of the wind through stark tree branches and the hoarse whisper of a hundred thousand explosive mechanical hexapods searching for human victims. Up above, snow geese honk to each other as they glide over the frigid Alaskan landscape.
Daniel H. Wilson, Robopocalypse
Hmm, is it just me, or do those little walnut-sized robots sound like the dreaded Nickelpedes that infest Xanth and are always looking for someone they can lop a little chunk of flesh off of?
I’m pretty sure I previously started reading Robopocalypse and then stopped, for some reason, but I don’t remember why. Most likely I obtained some other book I wanted to read first, and did so, and forgot to go back to Robopocalypse. But this time I will finish it for sur—ooh, a new Expanse story collection!
Meanwhile, work continues on Blue Roses! I’m still doing a bit of reassembly to salvage the bits I liked from the section where I decided it was going in the wrong direction. This is a piece of one such a section:
“Out there, beyond the mist, there is an island,” the gardener said. “On the island, there is a fortress. That is where your sister is being brought, along with … some others. But if I produced a ship, and we sailed it to the island, we would not find a fortress. If we waited there, we would not see them arrive. Their circumstances are not our circumstances. The geometry does not align.”
“I don’t even know what that means,” she said.
James V. Viscosi, Blue Roses
Am I actually going to finish this book? I still don’t know yet. But at least I’m making progress. Slow and steady something something, right?
Viscosity 
Absolutely! Slow progress is still progress, and it counts!
Interesting about the island’s geometry not lining up.
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That’s a pretty attractive robot on the book’s cover, except for the lashes looking like zips. I do like the shiny red eyes though.
Oh so many pedes. I’d prefer the nut-sized robots as long as they don’t have spider legs. Ugh, spiders.
That part of Blue Roses makes me curious. x
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