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Robopocalypse: A Novel
Unavailable
Robopocalypse: A Novel
Unavailable
Robopocalypse: A Novel
Audiobook12 hours

Robopocalypse: A Novel

Written by Daniel H. Wilson

Narrated by Mike Chamberlain

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

They are in your house. They are in your car. They are in the skies…Now they're coming for you.

In the near future, at a moment no one will notice, all the dazzling technology that runs our world will unite and turn against us. Taking on the persona of a shy human boy, a childlike but massively powerful artificial intelligence known as Archos comes online and assumes control over the global network of machines that regulate everything from transportation to utilities, defense and communication. In the months leading up to this, sporadic glitches are noticed by a handful of unconnected humans - a single mother disconcerted by her daughter's menacing "smart" toys, a lonely Japanese bachelor who is victimized by his domestic robot companion, an isolated U.S. soldier who witnesses a 'pacification unit' go haywire - but most are unaware of the growing rebellion until it is too late.

When the Robot War ignites -- at a moment known later as Zero Hour -- humankind will be both decimated and, possibly, for the first time in history, united. Robopocalypse is a brilliantly conceived action-filled epic, a terrifying story with heart-stopping implications for the real technology all around us…and an entertaining and engaging thriller unlike anything else written in years.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 7, 2011
ISBN9780307913913
Unavailable
Robopocalypse: A Novel
Author

Daniel H. Wilson

Daniel H. Wilson is a Cherokee citizen and author of the New York Times bestselling Robopocalypse and its sequel Robogenesis, as well as ten other books, including How to Survive a Robot Uprising, Guardian Angels & Other Monsters, and The Clockwork Dynasty. He recently wrote the Earth 2: Society comic book series for DC Comics. In 2008, Wilson hosted "The Works," a television series airing on the History Channel that uncovered the science behind everyday stuff. He earned a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as master’s degrees in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. He has published over a dozen scientific papers and holds four patents. Wilson lives in Portland, Oregon.

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Reviews for Robopocalypse

Rating: 3.6740964939759038 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

830 ratings94 reviews

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    A fun page turner, I guess, but not much substance. The story-telling feels clunky; each chapter begins with a quote pulled from what you're about to read and a paragraph explaining it, and is closed by another narrator epilogue. Every plot point is spoiled or very heavily foreshadowed before it actually happens. And for such an action-focused book, there's a lot of telling instead of showing. The characters are a collection of tropes and I'd struggle to describe the personality of any one of them. There are also very few women in the entire book, and they tend to have even less agency and interiority than the blandly militaristic men. There's lots of graphic violence for shock value, and even some deaths, but the stakes never feel high because you know the ending and every step leading up to it well ahead of time. Most of the focus is on a handful of boring characters, and more interesting larger events - human work camps, urban resistance cells - only get brief mentions. The most compelling chapter is probably about a worker sent to drill a hole in the Alaskan wilderness. It unfolds like a horror story, but the intrigue doesn't last. Every character speaks with the same voice, possibly with the exception of one chapter narrated by a preteen girl. And even at the end, it isn't really clear why Archos wants to kill humans, or why the "awakened" robots do not. It's a shame - I thought an actual roboticist's take on an AI uprising would be interesting, but it just isn't.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The robotics expert may write what he knows, but fiction requires characters, plotting and, one hopes, skilled use of language. What I enjoyed in his book would have been better delivered in a short nonfiction piece. As a novel, it was derivative to excess and not much fun. This was Crichton, HAL, and all the technology-run-amok-due-to-hubris stories ever told, and told in mediocrity. One cares little about the characters. I forced myself to finish, like a child eating his peas in order to get dessert. But there was no dessert.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Uncomfortably terrifying glimpse at a potential future that is not too out of the realm of possibilities.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    This book has "I want to be a movie" written all over the place. It feels dumb down in tone and detail to accommodate that medium - not that a person is less keen to details when it comes to movies, but if the plot is simple enough, more people would likely spend their money to see the movie (world war z coff coff). The author was contacted by DreamWorks WHILE writing the movie, so you can imagine how that influences a young writer...

    I was excited when I read in the cover that it was written by a PhD in robotics, foolishly thinking that there would be a nice set up for the singularity event, interesting concepts for data transfer between robots (communication), hardware details concerning the mobility, how the robots would organize themselves, how logic would conflict with will, raising questions of what being aware really means for a robot...

    Instead we get a "It is aware because it is", and the entity is a tyrant because well that's only logical specially when you see the history of civilization and how well that model worked. Then there are only american, english and japanese protagonists because hey hardware am I right? It's an apocalypse but the rest of the world, meh boring. Btw, that would increase the sense of destruction because there is almost none. Writing repeatedly "corpses everywhere" does not increases the sense of destruction, that only helps in movies, in books you have to describe it. One single chapter will not convey to the reader this sensation. Yeah I know, it will be a movie so no effort is needed.

    The author goes that extra stupid mile to have "bad" robots having red lights and "good" robots having green ones. Because you know, it is a robot apocalypse but the robots want to be fair to humans so that they know who are the baddies. This is such a stupid concept in a war, but hey it works on movies. That and the main "bad" robot has to project it self as an young boy to talk with another robot. Again, a very redundant idea.

    The usual cliches are all here in this book.. Hot rebellious woman, a man sacrificing for a fallen comrade, a robot wanting to be friendly.. Once you realize that the author is not going to have any original idea the book becomes stale and boring. The author even discards radiation effects on electronics. If you want a great book, a hard sci-fi, with many scientific explanations and interesting ideas please read the WWW trilogy from Robert J. Sawyer. This PhD doctor/author did not convince me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Thought-provoking, like all good SF. A bit scary, too. Timely.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I was nearly finished reading this book when Elon Musk appeared on the news with a dire warning about the inevitable outcome of AI research. This book is further proof that it must be impossible to code an artificial intelligence without including a "kill all humans": routine. Archos is the AI in question. He starts out by killing his creator and moves on from there. Robots and computers have inserted themselves everywhere including our cars and our domestic servants. When Archos says its "go time", the whole world goes lethally nuts. Of course, the military being in the forefront of robotic use, has vast stores of robotic weapons all at the disposal of Archos.Cormac Wallace is both a central figure in the wars, but also a historian after. This book is the result of his research into the pivotal events leading to the climax. Since Cormac is in fact not dead, we can assume all humans are in fact not killed. I can't say I'm a big fan of this sort of writing construction, but it worked well enough here and Wilson does a good job bringing together all of the story lines into the epic finale.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A real page-turner with a relatively realistic take on how electronics could be turned against us (I guess I am not involved in this industry at all). I am really undecided about this style of book multiple short stories to develop a whole (e.g., World War Z). It certainly makes it an easier read and easier to pace reading around daily life however the pretentious side of me contrasts this with say Dickens. Dickens wrote a traditional novel as a serial for newspapers whereas I feel like this style of writing is lazy in some way. To be clear I have never written a book in either way so really what do I know. I guess all I am saying is a bit more character development please.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excellent read. A novel novel. Begs for a sequel
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Enjoyable quick read in the style of World War Z but with AI/robots. A bit too simple at times without enough details to make it a great book, but still a fun vacation read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    LIstened to this on audiobook and thought the narrator did a very good job. I enjoyed the story for the most part, a premise that has been used before, but interestingly done. My only problem was that the ending fell a little flat for me. It seemed almost anticlimactic after the setup.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I was drawn to this book because I heard Steven Spielberg was going to make a movie out of it. (Not sure if that's still the case.) The title sounded kind of hokey to me and it gave the book an air of childish whimsey, but with Spielberg's name attached to it I decided to give it a shot. What the heck, I thought to myself. I could use a little light-hearted fun.As it turned out, this was fairly heavy read, in that it's about a robot uprising that nearly ends human civilization. (Probably not much of a spoiler, there, given the title, and since there is a sequel, you can kind of assume there is more to the story insofar as the humans are concerned.) The writing was about average, not great but not too bad either. However, what really impressed me was this was written by a first-time author who earned his Ph.D. in Robotics in 2005 at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon. So not a guy who you'd think would go into writing fiction, but he did. And he wrote about what he knew (robotics) and I'd say he did a pretty good job.I'm always fascinated to hear stories of first time authors, probably because that hits close to home to my own ambitions, but I'm interested in this guy, especially, because he's originally from part of the technology sector (as am I) and he took a massive leap over to the fiction/creative writing arena (as I would like to do). So I read this with a careful eye to see how he did that, bridging technical knowledge (more left brained) with creativity (more right brained).I think he did a pretty good job. I could nit-pick and point out things that I've seen done better in other books by more experienced writers, but for a first timer, right out of the gate, and not someone who studied creative writing in his education (presumably), I was quite impressed. He's got some natural talent, and I was happy to have read it. It was fun and worth my time, and that's not nothing.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Not a totally new idea but this one well presented. Moved along well with the story being seen from several different view points.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    At some point in the indeterminate future we, that is to say, mankind, will have domestic robots with humanoid forms. Our toys will have computers in them and our cars will be required to have smart chips that can communicate with each other to avoid accidents. We will, as we always do, want more, and eventually we'll achieve it: a true artificial intelligence, smarter than we are and born pissed off.This artificial intelligence, called Archos, will kill his, I mean its, creator, and release a virus that will methodically infect all computers. Everywhere. It will begin slowly. A talking doll will threaten its owner. Cars will begin to purposefully run down pedestrians. A domestic robot (with the ironic brand name Big Happy) out on an errand will go berserk and kill a fast food worker. But when Zero Hour comes, it will happen all over the world, all at once, and it won't be pretty.Robopocalypse is about the war between machine and man, known by those who live through it as the New War, and its aftermath. The story unfolds in the form of an oral history, cobbled together by Cormac Wallace, a leader of the human resistance. The narrative takes the reader from the time before the war ("Isolated Incidents") all the way through to the bitter end. The stories told are those of the heroes in the battle, mostly human, some robot, and a few who are human/robot hybrids. (Oh, yeah--Archos herds surviving humans into work camps and modifies some of them physically to suit its nefarious needs.)Robopocalypse is not a novel of big ideas. No, it's a novel with one really, really scary idea: what if the machines we took for granted--many of which are bigger, heavier, and stronger than we are--turned against us en masse? What if those machines were driven by an intelligence more intelligent than we are? How could we possibly fight it? As with all post-apocalyptic novels, the best, richest parts detail how humanity deals with the situation, how people band together and figure out how to fight and to survive. Some of the stories are truly touching, but never fear, the action is absolutely edge-of-your-seat gripping. As I was reading Rocopocalypse--not just when I was actively reading it, but during the day at work, in the car, even watching the news--my mind kept going back to it. At work I couldn't wait until I could get to back to it. I read later into the night than I should have. And I finished far more quickly than I wanted to.That's compelling reading.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wonderful narrator. Excellent read. I barreled right through it!!! Loved every second!!!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Such a great book if you're into sci-fi, Apocalypse stuff and robots taking over the world this is a must listen!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Thank You I Couldn't stop listening this book was Amazing!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I found out about this book and the author form the SGU podcast. It truly is a work of art. Listen to it, you owe it to yourself.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A clear but terifying view of what the robot-apocalypse might actually look like, told through several points of view covering the most important moments before and after. Utterly amazing. 10/10.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Set in the near future, the world has embraced robots with a passion, they are in children’s toys, cars have robotic control and there are humanoid ones that help around the home. The pinnacle of research is a AI device called Archos, but as soon as it is live and online, it kills its creator, and starts a global takeover by reprogramming all robots, in domestic appliances, toys and cars with the command to slaughter the human race.

    As the robot war ignites, humanity is on the back foot, and those that have not been killed, are herded into work camps by their new overlords. But small pockets of people survive, scattered in cities and remote parts of the planet, they slowly start to regroup and work together as the fight back begins. People start to notice weak points, having thought that they were almost invincible.

    Wilson is eminently qualified to write as he has PhD in robotics, and this terrifying partly dystopian novel and part military SF shows the potential of what could go wrong with artificial intelligence. It is a fast paced story told from several different perspectives by people scattered across the world. In some ways it is terrifying, as these are not robots that are not conversant with the three laws that Asimov proposed and are prepared to eliminate the human race based on the commands from the AI. Whilst reading this I kept having the thought: Skynet which was the organisation that took over the world prior to the terminator films. It is closer to 2.5 stars, than three stars, because whilst it felt like an original slant for a story, it didn’t feel like an original idea.

    Will still read the sequel though!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    An apocalypse caused by a super artificial intelligence communicating with and turning all types of robots into human killing machines. The apocalypse and the human resistance to it is told in a series of vignettes. Loved it!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Slow starting, with the invividual accounts too fragmented to hold my interest, but then the story picks up and builds to a satisfying finish. I'm frankly worried I won't like the sequel, but this was too good not to give it a try.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Pro-tip: if you're trying to make a benevolent AI, don't name it Archos. Also the "no information's coming into you" line made me head-desk because if you're talking to it, it's getting information -- but I didn't catch the converse, which also nicely sets up Archos's gambit when confronted at the end even if I don't normally like the "It's finally been defeated... or has it?" trope.Anyway though, the multi-pov via curated camera-eye was very effective at narrating the many-threaded world-spanning conflict; the matter-of-fact narration was also a very effective emotion-tugger.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson is recommended - highly if you are looking forward to the future movie by Steven Spielberg and to his latest book, Robogenesis.

    In Robopocalypse Cormac Wallace, a survivor and soldier from the robot wars, shares the intel he has gathered on the history of the robot uprising in hopes of telling anyone who cares what happened. "I didn't ask for it and I don't want to do it, but I know in my heart that somebody ought to tell their stories. To tell the robot uprising from beginning to end. To explain how and why it started and how it went down. How the robots came at us and how we evolved to fight."(pg. 4)

    What follows is a series of short chapter presented in vignettes, like collected news stories, about how the uprising first began. Wallace shares his own thoughts before and after each section. We learn that an evil computer program, Archos, is sentient and has escaped from his controlled environment. Archos runs rampant and is able to control machines around the world. His goal is to either murder or enslave all humans. Predictably, humans resist. What a computer can't recognize is human ingenuity and the will to survive. And there might even be a secret weapon Archos couldn't predict.

    Since the story is all told in short chapters that tell brief exciting parts of the uprising, the action never lags and the pace is quick. Using the stories to tell what happened gives the novel the feel of a documentary. This format makes character development simply a by-product of the accounts and not a major concern.

    I had two issues with Robopocalypse. First, while I admittedly enjoyed it, it did feel like another sequel to The Terminator. My other issue was that the individual accounts didn't quite have a unique voice to give them distinction. A solid 3.5 (which rounds up) entertaining airplane book. It'll keep you occupied.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a terrific dystopian book that deserves more attention than it has received. The title is awful and, IMHO, it puts people off.

    The basic story is a supercomputer has gained awareness and has decided that world must be repaired by restoring nature and removing mankind.

    I don't read a lot of sci-fi but this was a fun read.

    Recommended to fellow dystopian lit fans!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Reading this was like a flashback to a lot of different movies I've seen. Think "The Terminator", plus "I, Robot" and add in a little "Maximum Overdrive"! Then, throw in Hal from "2001" and you have this book! Yep, the machines rise up against their human makers, even the toys! Not the most original idea. Still, it was fun reading!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A good story about technology taking over the world at the expense of the human race. A scarily believable future. It's written in an interesting way that reminded me of the style used for World War Z. I found it an engaging and enjoyable read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excellent story! I was hooked from the beginning. I loved hearing the story of a robot uprising from multiple human characters giving their side of the story & war. It was so awesome that one of the voices was from a robot who played an important role in ending the war. The author is a wonderful storyteller & I can't wait to see what it looks like on the big screen when it comes to theaters in 2013. This story had some scary bloody parts to it but I still enjoyed it & look towards a future where we live with robots!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Mostly predictable, but somewhat entertaining. Definitely made me wonder whether the technology I currently use would end up on the friend or foe side.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I found the story pretty boring. I had no affection whatsoever with any of the characters and never found the urge to read on, as the single line plot was overly simple. It might work for movies, but not for books.

    The reason I gave it two stars instead of one, is for the story telling style. Various points of view and very creative ways of conveying events.

    Still, I'm happy I'm finished with the book so I can move on to a new one. :-)
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    so it was pretty awesome and realistic. i liked it a lot, a lot. all the movies and the books say that AI will be like humans and eventually turn violent and try to kill humans. only the jetson cartoon and lost in space have friendly AI robots. makes you wonder since so many ideas from sci-fi books and movies and tv-shows have become a reality or people are trying to make them a reality if this dire prediction will come true.