Author: Daniel H Wilson
Publisher: Books on Tape
Rating: WARTY!
Read sadly by Mike Chamberlin.
I don't know how it's even possible to write any novel about a battle between humans and machines and make it so boring that you want to feed the disks to a machine that will shred them, but Wilson sure achieved it with this one. He supposedly has a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon and it shows in his writing. Carnegie Mellon is an anagram for cage liner lemon after all.
The story is first person PoV, a format which in my experience is only very rarely readable. In this case, the appalling writing and the lackluster reading contrived to make it un-listenable. This is compounded by the fact that with audio books it isn't possible to skip prologues and chapter heading quotes like you can a print or ebook. You have to do it by guesswork or suffer through them.
The story here is that advanced machines began disrupting human life under the control of a master AI, and slowly (once humans even realized what was happening) it became all-out (or even all-in) war, so pretty much a rip-off of the terminator movies crossed with I, Robot, and a lot less engaging.
The book starts at (or near) the end, with the narrator destroying insect-like bots using a flame-thrower. Here's the dumbest bullshit of all. The bots are attracted to human body heat, and as soon as they come into contact with it, they detonate, which can cause at the very least, severe injury. So which cosmic moron came up with the idea of using heat to kill them? Oh yeah, the PhD from Mellon.
He tries to wriggle out of this numb-nuts idea by claiming that the intense heat of the flamethrower is so high that it spoils the chemicals used to create the explosion, but he seems to be completely clueless that outside of that intense zone of heat, there is a very variable surrounding zone, somewhere, which matches human body temperature perfectly, and which would cause all the bots within that zone to detonate simultaneously. Moronic!
Never once does he think of destroying them with an EMP, never once of blowing them up with electricity or grenades; never once of using radio to disrupt their internal signals. After wading through this crap, then we get a huge info-dump on how we got to this beginning ending. This was tedious in the extreme.
I made it only to disk three of a ten-disk set and gave up. And I was skimming track after track even then. Oh yeah, and the audio is produced by "Books on Tape" - seriously? They never once thought of changing their name to bring them into the 121st century? And no, it's not an old disk set - it's copyrighted 2011. BoT is owned by Random House. Quite evidently this is another cluster-book by Big Publishing™!
This novel sucks like a vacuum. And the blurb writer really needs to discover what the word 'decimates' actually means. And one final thing: once again the image on the cover has nothing whatsoever to do with the novel's content.
