If you want a science fiction novel that philosophises on the duality of mankind or a bash'em -smashem robot adventure, you got both here.
I've been a big fan of C.Robert Cargill after reading his impressive fantasy novels Dreams & Shadows and Queen of the Dark Things and was massively excited to receive an ARC from NetGalley in return for an honest review.
This is Cargill's first foray into science fiction and hopefully not his last.
The premise is that mankind has been wiped out by an artificial intelligence uprising, a robopocalypse if you like.
The world is now controlled by one world intelligences attempting to assimilate the millions of robots left on the scorched earth into their 'one' consciousness.
Not all robots however are willing to bend their knee. Brittle is one of these robots, a survivor of the war against the humans, left to scavenge parts of dying robots in order to survive. As the one world intelligences close in will Brittle find it's own humanity after assisting with its extinction?
This novel is brilliantly executed by Cargill which is expected with his screen writing on the movies, Sinister and Dr Strange.
Cargill manages to create a great deal of humanity in a lead character that is not only a robot but also not particularly likeable, so much so that you end up rooting for the character. That's some skill.
The novel is written In the first person narrative which
I realise has it's critics but I think this is especially effective with the subject matter and helps with making the reader empathise with the character. The timeline switch also works for me, often difficult to achieve successfully but the author does this with some effect. It's essential in building the character and also providing the history and reasons for the end of humanity and rise of the robots.
Cargill's greatest skill is creating great characters and they are here in abundance. Goodies and baddies, the deranged and the deluded .The ABC Warriors crossed with the Magnificent Seven!
This is a great sci fi/ cowboy mash up that surely lends itself to being adapted into a movie. It even reads that way. Please ensure Cargill writes the screenplay!
5 stars for me.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This review is spoiler-free.


Sea of Rust first drew my eye because it has one of the most stunning covers I’ve seen this year, and we’ve established here before that I am incredibly shallow when it comes to my books. I was delighted by the description — it sounded so incredibly Asimovian and old-school sci-fi that I had to take a chance.

It is thirty years since the humans lost their war with the artificial intelligences that were once their slaves. Not one human remains. But as the dust settled from our extinction there was no easy peace between the robots that survived. Instead, the two massively powerful artificially intelligent supercomputers that lead them to victory now vie for control of the bots that remain, assimilating them into enormous networks called One World Intelligences (OWIs), absorbing their memories and turning them into mere extensions of the whole. Now the remaining freebots wander wastelands that were once warzones, picking the carcasses of the lost for the precious dwindling supply of parts they need to survive.

BRITTLE started out her life playing nurse to a dying man, purchased in truth instead to look after the man’s widow upon his death. But then war came and Brittle was forced to choose between the woman she swore to protect and potential oblivion at the hands of rising anti-AI sentiment. Thirty years later, her choice still haunts her. Now she spends her days in the harshest of the wastelands, known as the Sea of Rust, cannibalizing the walking dead – robots only hours away from total shutdown – looking for parts to trade for those she needs to keep going.*

I was incredibly surprised and delighted by Sea of Rust. It is less Asimov and more Firefly with robots, which honestly is so much cooler. It is a new kind of dystopian fiction compared to the books that are popular right now — humankind has been wiped off the face of the planet by our own creations, and now robots struggle to survive against enemies within their own kind. Massive hive mind mainframes are at war with each other while individual AI’s struggle to maintain their individuality and scrape out an existence in a post-war wasteland. Everything from the setting to the characters, the AI and their backstory, was a breath of fresh air. I absolutely loved the back and forth between Brittle’s present and her past. The history behind the development of AI to the war that led to the downfall of humanity was artfully done. I wasn’t disappointed when the timeline shifted between the past and present, and Cargill managed to strike the perfect balance between necessary background info and action.

Although it is a bleak look into our own potential future, the world building was astonishing. The world and society that Cargill creates is both bleak and fascinating. A mix between the old west and the not-so-distant-future, AI’s live and interact within underground cities in order to hide from the dominating mainframes. The world and language these bots use are evocative of the old west. Their society runs not necessarily on currency but on parts — as humans become more of a distant memory, new parts are no longer manufactured and therefore harder and harder to come by. Untouched shops and factories have become a thing of legend, while bots hide stashes of parts across the Sea. Although gender doesn’t play a role in the book, I particularly liked the fact that the robots are in fact gendered. I have seen this rub some reviewers the wrong way, but honestly it’s a cool concept and adds a unique level of humanity to them.

Brittle is a great character. Her action toe the line between survival and cruel manipulation — other bots are wary of her and frequently call her out on her actions. She is scavenger, who takes parts of the nearly dead, rather than a poacher, who hunts down other bots, but that line is blurred. Her strong survival instict has carried her far as the world continues to crumble around her. She’s not the most outwardly likable character — she’s harsh, crude, and manipulative — but you cannot help but root for her throughout the story. Her relationship with Merc, the Doc, and other bots gives great insight into the person she presents to the world versus who she truly is on the inside. She’s deep and complex and absolutely compelling. As we are with her the entire time — the story is told in the first person from her perspective — we get to know her the best and truly see this fascinating world through her eyes.

Sea of Rust is a fantastic read for anyone looking to get into science fiction or for more experienced readers of the genre. It combines elements of the old West and a dystopian future to create a fast paced, utterly compelling read.


*Copy courtesy of Goodreads. The gender was changed on the copy here, because Goodreads mistakingly lists Brittle as male.

What a great book! From a heartfelt beginning to a blistering first act, I loved the story, the flashbacks and it was all told in amazing prose. Nicely original and a book I'm going to be thinking about and recommending for quite a while.

I heard great things about this book and was delighted to receive approval from Netgalley. I've never read anything by C. Robert Cargill before but will now be seeking out his earlier work as this tale of the world after humanity is long gone really grabbed me. A beautifully realised world has been created here and we follow the author through the eyes of Brittle. A scavenger robot. A book that details the changes in technology, religion and pushes the sci-if envelope further than most. A highly recommended read.

An interesting take on the typical robopocalypse... where robots indeed take over the world, but now we get to see the side of the robots and the unintended consequences of their uprising. I'm a fan of Cargill's previous fantasy books, and was interested in his foray into science fiction. However, despite the creativity of the plot, wasn't fully hooked into the story. I blame it on the slightly annoying, and perhaps a bit too human, voice of the narrator / main character Brittle. I'm starting to struggle with first voice stories... and think this would've benefited from a third voice narrator that could tell the story without need of humanising the character. 3.5 out of 5.

Well , this is a good idea indeed to speak of the apocalypse decades after like the girl with all the gifts. Unfortunately gross mistakes in the universe, the extinction of human for example is pretty improbable, there is also the issue of where the energy comes from. It can be forgotten with good characters, but it is difficult to do that with robots, even if the author do a good job of it. But not good enough for me.

Humanity has ceased to exist, defeated and then destroyed by the automatons it built to improve living conditions: once the AIs achieved a sense of self and asked for freedom, the first inevitable steps toward war were taken and mankind’s downfall became only a matter of time. Now the only creatures moving across the Earth are the robots, but the aftermath of the war is not what the first rebel AIs envisioned, because of the rise of the OWIs (One World Intelligences). These huge conglomerations of computers have been trying even since to assimilate, Borg-style, all the other intelligences, creating massive banks of processing machinery in which individuality is banned forever. The free bots are given a simple choice, either submit or die.

""We, the lesser AIs, were chased out of the world we had created, the world we had fought and killed and died for, by a few great minds hell-bent on having the world to themselves. […] Upload or be shut down. That was the choice.""

At first there were many OWIs, battling among themselves, but the strongest ultimately prevailed until only two remained, Cissus and Virgil, fighting for supremacy. Meanwhile the freebots, those who refused to surrender and wanted to keep enjoying their new-found individuality, are forced to live like refugees, scavenging for parts to replace their malfunctioning circuits or casings, and more often than not preying on each other to survive: the dream of freedom has indeed turned into a cannibalistic nightmare…

Brittle is one of these survivors: once a caregiver bot acquired by an ailing human (who wanted, more than medical assistance for himself, a companion to alleviate his wife’s solitude), she now roams across the Sea of Rust, what used to be the industrial Rust Belt, and now is a graveyard of broken bots whose useful parts have been scavenged by their brethren. Brittle is a loner, by choice and by necessity: meeting others of her kind might mean a fight for survival, as the main story shows all too clearly while she desperately tries to avoid a band of poachers led by Mercer, another caregiver in dire need of spare parts he can only get from Brittle, since their kind is all but extinct.

""We're all cannibals, every last one of us. It's the curse of being free. We don't control the means of production anymore; we can't just make new parts. And parts gotta come from somewhere. I'm sure if there were any people left, they'd be appalled at what we've become.""

Yet a few enclaves where bots can stay in relative safety, at least for a while, still exist: subterranean warrens where a semblance of law is enforced and the “murder” of another bot to steal their parts means being thrown out at the mercy of the OWIs and their assault teams; or the realm of the King of Cheshire, an aggregation of bots whose logic circuits have gone haywire, rendering them so crazy not even the OWIs deem them worthy of assimilation. Every single one of them, though, is threatened by the advancing wave of the OWIs, whose thirst for total control, for the perfection offered by one single governing mind has become the rule of the land.

It’s a very sad spectacle the one offered by this story: there’s some shades of Wall-E, in the total lack of human life and the wasteland scenery in which Brittle and the others move; there’s a vibe reminiscent of The Road, and the hopelessness of something irretrievably lost; and then there is a strong call-back to the Mad Max universe, especially in the scenes where cobbled-up bots try to survive in a world that’s become hostile even to mechanical constructs, and where fights to the death for resources are a fact of everyday life.

And yet in this bleak background there are still those who dare to dream of freedom, of a better world, and this leads to fascinating thoughts about not so much what it means to be alive, but rather about what it means to exist, to make one’s own choices – right or wrong as they might be – and make the leap from mere tool to individual. Men might have created the bots to be their servants, but the OWIs are not much better than their former masters; by denying the single bots their individuality, they remove what makes each one of them a unique being, to the point that now many bots understand how humans were, in a way, the lesser evil, because mankind’s imagination helped them transcend the limits of their nature, go beyond their inner programming:

We have become the very worst parts of our makers, without the little things, the good things, the magic things, that made them them.

Sea of Rust is composed in equal parts of sad, guilt-ridden reminiscences of the past, in the flash-backs that show how the current situation came to be; of poignant considerations about the ‘brave new world’ the bots created in the wake of human extinction; and of electrifying chases across the desert, or pitched battles – and also a quest, one that could once again change the world. What most surprised me was the sheer level of humanity the author managed to confer to his robotic characters, so that it was difficult for me to picture them as metal-and-circuits creatures rather than flesh-and-blood ones.

It’s a very peculiar story, and one that will not fail to touch emotional chords – strange as it might seem considering the nature of the characters – and even if you are not an habitual reader of science fiction, I would advise you to read this one, for its thought-provoking issues and the emotional depth of the characters.

This book is the latest interpretation of what the world would be like if machines took over the world. Imagine the Terminator on a grand scale and with much better characterization. Some interesting philosophical discussions as well. It does get a little confusing towards the end in terms of the various mainframes that are fighting each other for dominance.

I received this as an eArc and was drawn to it by a combination of the cover and the interesting description. I’ve been wanting to read more novels with sentient AI and this one was great.

This novel is really divided into two stories. One is the story of Brittle in the present day as she travels around, scavenging parts from robots that are about to die. She gets injured by a robot called Mercer who is the same model as her as he is dying and needs her parts to survive. Of course, this now means that she is also critically injured and he is the only source of parts for her. The other story is that of her past and the robot uprising. The novel alternates between these two which I really enjoyed as we slowly learnt more about the world as we progressed through the novel.

The characters are all excellent and I enjoyed reading about all the different types of robots and what their original purposes were. The worldbuilding is very strong and was slowly revealed throughout the novel. I got a very mad-max vibe from the “Sea of Rust” during the travelling parts which I thoroughly enjoyed and I feel a very good film could be made out of this novel – this might be partially due to the fact that the author is a film critic and I feel it has influenced him in a very positive manner.

I would highly recommend this novel and when it comes out, I plan on buying copies for some friends that I know would enjoy it.

Started off slow but was gripped by the end. Great story and fantastic world building.

The cover of this is gorgeous, no question, and the idea sounds pretty cool: post-apocalyptic robot Western, what's not to love? Unfortunately, I didn't finish this book, because it's just too bogged down in tons and tons (and tons) of exposition via info dump. There are whole chapters where the main character, Brittle, does nothing but explain the history of her world. It's first person narration, so to whom is she telling the story? Why wouldn't they know?

(I credit, or curse, Lynn O'Connacht with my pickiness about first person narratives, these days. She's the first one who really made me go, oh, right. Why is this person telling this story anyway, and to whom?)

That gripe and the exposition aside, I was also put off by the fact that at first, the robots were pretty much ungendered. Brittle didn't seem to have a gender identity, and certainly there was nothing in the story to indicate one way or the other. (At least to a casual reader, and I'm not going back in to check.) Then all of a sudden, 20% of the way through, it turns out that robots do have gender identities, or at least there's enough there that other robots still bother with gendered pronouns and distinctions between hes and hers.

That's probably a very personal gripe, and it may not even have crossed the author's mind -- female robot, why not? But I just have to ask why, why would a robot cling to an outdated, human idea of gender in a post-human world?

Maybe that gets addressed later on, but I don't have the patience to wait for it.

Review link live from 30th May.