So This Is How The World Ends

Wow!  I haven't read a book this engaging for quite a while.  Robopocalypse, by Daniel H. Wilson, is a very imaginative and well written story.  There are two main schools of thought.  One thinks that the world will end with the birth of the zombie.  The other thinks the same will happen with beings of our own creation: robots and computers.  This book explores the latter of the two. 

The story starts at the end of a war, with one person finding a robot relic that has recorded all the human/robot interactions during the conflict.  The person discovers that all the people recorded on this device are under a category labelled "Heroes."  It seems that the robots, under the leadership of a supercomputer called Archos, weren't trying to eradicate the human race, just weed them down a bit. 

The book is written as a third-person account of the heroes witnessed in the device.  The different "hero stories" follow a linear timeline, and jump around between 5-6 different heroes.  Each person's story line starts out with them noticing something different about the robots that were built to serve man, and progress through their personal battles against the uprising. 

This is a book that was recommended to me by a number of websites.  I have had to wait all summer to read it after reserving it through my local library.  It was definitely worth the wait.  Mr. Wilson has a Ph.D. in Robotics, but doesn't write like you think a scientist would.  He doesn't focus on the technical aspects, but instead paints a very detailed picture of what he wants you to see and get out of the story.  This is a quality that not all writers have, but when they do, it makes the story so much more engrossing. 

I have heard that Stephen Spielberg acquired the movie rights before the book was even published.  I will be very interesting to see what he can do with a story like this.  In the meantime, lets hope that the next book Mr. Wilson puts out will be just as entertaining as this one!