If you read the top reviews of Robopocalypse on Goodreads you are going to see some pretty low scores and some scathing criticism. Those criticisms are all spot on. Fortunately, they didn't deter me from enjoying this book. Sure, it is one bad cliche after another. The characters are flat cutouts that you never feel any true empathy for. This is the book of an action movie, but before the action movie is released. It tries to adopt the World War Z style of small set pieces as told by those who experienced it first hand....but it doesn't do it very well. Archos, an experimental artificial intelligence, manages to usurp its creators and launch into full scale genocide mode. The overriding goal of the machine is to turn the world into a sort of zoo, with all life achieving what Archos believes is a natural balance. This includes humans, but only a very limited way. Thus, Archos goes about utilizing all automata available to end the overabundance of human life. The survivors of the initial outbreak of war band together to fight back.This is not great literature. This is the book form of a SyFy channel original. Take that for what it is worth. Two-and-a-half. Maybe it is unfair to have read this post-apocalyptic story after the King (excusing the pun) of all apocalyptic stories ("The Stand"), but I feel like I would have found the story flat no matter what. I understand that the framing device was an oral history and that the accounts were supposedly picked up by radio or video recorded during the robot uprising, but I did not feel like any of the characters became anything more than names on a page. When characters died, I felt nothing. If only there were something cold, clinical and unfeeling I could compare myself to...oh, a robot, I guess. For all the great action scenes, all in all, I felt the novel was underwritten. It was as if the writer rushed through the novel because he needed to start on the big-budget Hollywood screenplay (to be fair, a movie adaptation would probably kick total and complete ass.) I really wish I enjoyed this book more.One major qualm...the robot uprising is referred to in the book as "Zero Hour" and one of the aspects of the uprising is loss of global communication. So, how does everyone around the world know that the uprising is referred to as Zero Hour if they cannot communicate?
What do You think about Robocalypse (2011)?
Great writing and intriguing back story. I couldn't put it down. Definite page turner.
—bnsnyder26
Great action. A nice change from zombies though there is nothing wrong with zombies.
—allo
