walkingreaderreview's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
2.75
mlklein1's review
2.0
This book was pretty fun and I read it very quickly - but in the end it was fairly repetitive. I can't imagine how many reviewers firmly planted their tongue in their cheeks and talked about a deus ex machina arriving just in time to help the heroes. But you know what? It's an appropriate analysis.
I don't like to include spoilers in reviews, so I won't, and really the opening chapter makes no bones about the fact that it's telling you the very end of the story - an interesting choice that I still feel removes suspense from any tale. All that said, something major happens close to the end of the book - to one of the more interesting characters - that (in the narrator's words) "changes the course of human and robot history." But it isn't explained. A little more time explaining what happened and a few less unwinnable battles that are somehow won would have been appreciated.
Wilson's projections of what happens to society when the robots come for us is very good, but I would have liked a little more of it even.
Steven Spielberg optioned this book before it was published and that may have rushed the publication a bit. The film is slated to come out in 2012, and I have a sneaking suspicion that this is going to prove one of those rare instances where the movie is better than the book.
I don't like to include spoilers in reviews, so I won't, and really the opening chapter makes no bones about the fact that it's telling you the very end of the story - an interesting choice that I still feel removes suspense from any tale. All that said, something major happens close to the end of the book - to one of the more interesting characters - that (in the narrator's words) "changes the course of human and robot history." But it isn't explained. A little more time explaining what happened and a few less unwinnable battles that are somehow won would have been appreciated.
Wilson's projections of what happens to society when the robots come for us is very good, but I would have liked a little more of it even.
Steven Spielberg optioned this book before it was published and that may have rushed the publication a bit. The film is slated to come out in 2012, and I have a sneaking suspicion that this is going to prove one of those rare instances where the movie is better than the book.
literatetexan's review
4.0
Top notch. Well written and a lot of fun, in spite of glaring similarities to World War Z by Max Brooks.
mschlat's review
2.0
An infuriatingly bad book.
There are glimmers of cleverness and good writing. Especially in the first third of the book, the reader regularly gets fascinating insights about how a robot revolution might happen and how humans might fight back. (I especially liked the ideas that city dwellers could most effectively battle robots by removing all the smooth surfaces in an urban environment.) And, early on, you have some truly frightening bits of horror.
But the whole thing is gigantically hampered by the format. Ostensibly, you are reading oral histories compiled by our protagonist, but that conceit fades throughout the book, and the near the end, it reads as regular first person or third person narrative. And that's a good thing, given that Wilson does a poor job of writing authentic sounding oral histories --- too often, our speakers lapse into exposition mode. ("I am writing this review on Goodreads, a social networking site focused around books.")
But even worse, each small chapter --- each oral history vignette --- ends with our main protagonist telling us what happens next. It's a mechanism that drains nearly all of the tension out of the work. You read a chapter, you think "Hey --- I wonder if X, Y, or even Z happen next?", and your friendly narrator just tells you "It's Y." So, time after time, you get statements like "Person X's discovery would be the turning point in the war" without even seeing as a reader how that might happen. It's like writing an autobiography of JFK, stopping while the PT-109 is sinking, and then adding a coda: "He later became one of the most beloved presidents in U.S. history." Ick. Ick, ick, ick....
There are other problems --- unexplained plot twists, little to no characterization of most of the humans, rampant lack of subtlety --- but nothing made me want to throw the book across the room like those chapter endings.
There are glimmers of cleverness and good writing. Especially in the first third of the book, the reader regularly gets fascinating insights about how a robot revolution might happen and how humans might fight back. (I especially liked the ideas that city dwellers could most effectively battle robots by removing all the smooth surfaces in an urban environment.) And, early on, you have some truly frightening bits of horror.
But the whole thing is gigantically hampered by the format. Ostensibly, you are reading oral histories compiled by our protagonist, but that conceit fades throughout the book, and the near the end, it reads as regular first person or third person narrative. And that's a good thing, given that Wilson does a poor job of writing authentic sounding oral histories --- too often, our speakers lapse into exposition mode. ("I am writing this review on Goodreads, a social networking site focused around books.")
But even worse, each small chapter --- each oral history vignette --- ends with our main protagonist telling us what happens next. It's a mechanism that drains nearly all of the tension out of the work. You read a chapter, you think "Hey --- I wonder if X, Y, or even Z happen next?", and your friendly narrator just tells you "It's Y." So, time after time, you get statements like "Person X's discovery would be the turning point in the war" without even seeing as a reader how that might happen. It's like writing an autobiography of JFK, stopping while the PT-109 is sinking, and then adding a coda: "He later became one of the most beloved presidents in U.S. history." Ick. Ick, ick, ick....
There are other problems --- unexplained plot twists, little to no characterization of most of the humans, rampant lack of subtlety --- but nothing made me want to throw the book across the room like those chapter endings.
bookishnicole's review against another edition
4.0
This book was so easy to gobble up that I forgot that it was 350 pages. The content and eagerness to know what happened next made it hard to put down, but the break up of the chapters made it easier if you have a busy life and suddenly had to do something. This book wasn't formatted the way that I expected. I was expecting a typical novel; a story that told the robot apocalypse from one persons point of view if told from first person narrative or flipping back and forth between different people if told from third person. This book was told more like a documentary, a looking back on what happened- very World War Z.
The rest of my review is here:
http://fireflyreadit.blogspot.com/2012/01/robopocalypse.html
The rest of my review is here:
http://fireflyreadit.blogspot.com/2012/01/robopocalypse.html
amywoolsey_93's review against another edition
dark
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
1.75
pbobrit's review against another edition
4.0
A fun quick read. Formatted along the lines of World War Z, with the story made up of a series of snapshots taken over the course of a few years involving a reasonably large cast of characters. Definitely a book that is looking to be optioned as a summer blockbuster. If you are looking for something easy to read at the beach then this could be the book for you.
jimmypat's review
2.0
An entertaining and engaging read that, unfortunately, jumps the shark in the last 100 pages. When the good guy robots show up and act like humans, I just thought it got ridiculous and even more unbelievable.
In addition, there was one thing that particularly bothered me throughout. Whenever God was mentioned by a character, his name was never capitalized unless it happened to be the first word in a sentence. I'm not sure what the reasoning for this was. This choice seemed to be an attempt to downplay God, to not recognize his name as a name, and make him less than the human characters (and robot characters for that matter). This decision by Wilson seemed to paint the reality of this book with a soullessness deeper than the robot villains of this book.
In addition, there was one thing that particularly bothered me throughout. Whenever God was mentioned by a character, his name was never capitalized unless it happened to be the first word in a sentence. I'm not sure what the reasoning for this was. This choice seemed to be an attempt to downplay God, to not recognize his name as a name, and make him less than the human characters (and robot characters for that matter). This decision by Wilson seemed to paint the reality of this book with a soullessness deeper than the robot villains of this book.
chanman's review
Well, this is just sad because this book had so much potential. I saw this book was available on my Kindle as an audiobook, and so I decided to broaden my horizons a bit, and decided to read what was a hardcore scifi novel. Now, at first glance, this may seem like a stereotypical robots take over the world scenario, and, I have to admit, it is, but I was optimistic that this novel would be good based on two things. One, the author has a Ph.D in robotics, and it was told somewhat oddly in a series of journals, so it should be filled with various interesting ways that Robots take over the world, right? Yes...but that is part of the problem.
You see, for all the good that Wilson does for the different ways that we see the robots go haywire, in the end, the writing is just boring, and never really managed to grab my attention. We would go from a seemingly interesting story about a military robot that can go from harmless to killer in a second, to a domestic service bot that...goes from harmless to killer in about a second. Many of the basic premises seemed to be repeated with variation in how who they were told to. Also, another sin is that the writing just isn’t that good. We expect that the writing would changed with each character in some way, since we typically see it from various different points of view- a 14 year old girl writing about what happened when she was ten, a store clerk speaking to a detective, a military translator speaking at a senate committee- but they all begin to sound the same, and it gets on my nerves. This book started off really strong, with a soldier who kills little bots with a freakin’ flame thrower, writing how he discovered a robot that recorded the Robot uprising from the start to the finish. This opening scene is filled with good action that one hardly sees again, or, at least, does not see enough of. This is sad, because it should be interesting but the mediocre writing, coupled with the narrator not sounding like he was good enough for this, made me want to put it down and not pick it up again.
It is for these reasons that I give it a two out of five. While there are some good elements here beneath the surface there just wasn’t enough to hold my attention.
You see, for all the good that Wilson does for the different ways that we see the robots go haywire, in the end, the writing is just boring, and never really managed to grab my attention. We would go from a seemingly interesting story about a military robot that can go from harmless to killer in a second, to a domestic service bot that...goes from harmless to killer in about a second. Many of the basic premises seemed to be repeated with variation in how who they were told to. Also, another sin is that the writing just isn’t that good. We expect that the writing would changed with each character in some way, since we typically see it from various different points of view- a 14 year old girl writing about what happened when she was ten, a store clerk speaking to a detective, a military translator speaking at a senate committee- but they all begin to sound the same, and it gets on my nerves. This book started off really strong, with a soldier who kills little bots with a freakin’ flame thrower, writing how he discovered a robot that recorded the Robot uprising from the start to the finish. This opening scene is filled with good action that one hardly sees again, or, at least, does not see enough of. This is sad, because it should be interesting but the mediocre writing, coupled with the narrator not sounding like he was good enough for this, made me want to put it down and not pick it up again.
It is for these reasons that I give it a two out of five. While there are some good elements here beneath the surface there just wasn’t enough to hold my attention.
beautifully_broken's review
5.0
Robots against humans, a New War begins. This is the story of humans call to arms and the resilience that can make us work as one and with anything that can help us survive. Thats what humans are good at, surviving against all odds. Seen though the eyes of the New War heros, from the first signs of the virus that ravishes the robots around the world. Little by little the evil spreads until zero hour and all robots and robotic machinery is infected, leading to open season on humans.
An action pact book that reads like a movie. A unique storyline of a terrifying future.
An action pact book that reads like a movie. A unique storyline of a terrifying future.