Robot uprisings are well-worn territory in science fiction, and as if to underscore his awareness of the fact Wilson peppers his story with references to his forebears. The conflict’s beginnings provide some of the book’s most effective moments, such as a slow-witted young employee recounting a domestic robot laying brutal siege to an ice cream shop and an unnerving transcript of air traffic controllers struggling to separate two airliners whose navigation systems start having homicidal urges. Often taking the disturbing form of a small child with an auto-tuned voice, Archos gradually releases a virus that leads the planet’s network of machines to violently turn on the human race. Using a similar oral history-styled conceit as “World War Z,” Wilson enlists civilian-turned-robot war veteran Cormac “Bright Boy” Wallace to anchor a series of first-person flashbacks to various sides of the uprising, from its ominous beginnings to its ultimate conclusion in snowy Alaska (though there’s room for a sequel, naturally).Īs is often the case with these kinds of things, the trouble begins when an artificial intelligence experiment called Archos grows just smart enough to kill its master, a statistics professor in Washington state. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if you can overlook some clunky dialogue and story turns in line with summer blockbuster season. Similarly, Wilson published the mock guidebook “How to Survive a Robot Uprising” in 2005, and “Robopocalypse” is its fiction spinoff, a crisply efficient and intermittently chilling summer read that carries such propulsive energy you can practically see the film’s storyboard being shaped behind every word, possibly because that’s exactly what was happening once a certain director got on board.
In 2003 Brooks broke through with the pithy parody “The Zombie Survival Guide,” and the resulting novel “World War Z” has been spun into a movie due next summer starring Brad Pitt.
How does a 33-year-old robotics engineer become the heir apparent to Michael Crichton? Attracting a name like Spielberg certainly helps, but so does following the path taken by fellow sci-fi upstart Max Brooks. What struggling novelist wouldn’t be envious of Wilson’s trajectory? None other than Steven Spielberg reached down from the heavens to option his new novel “Robopocalypse” - a deal brokered before the book was even finished, by the way - and rights to his still-unpublished follow-up have already been snapped up by another studio. If there’s such a thing as voodoo in literary circles, a lot of jealous sci-fi writers are probably burying needles into tiny Daniel H.
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