Slowly, and with little success (at first), humanity strikes back at the robots, learning something about the threat they face.

Cars mow down people in the streets (even as their owners, trapped within, scream in horror and beat at the windscreens) elevators and domestic robots conspire to drop terrified people down empty shafts or shake them to jelly planes crash themselves buildings seal themselves and asphyxiate their occupants.īut some humans survive, thanks to luck and sheer numbers and a bit of cunning, and these humans live to fight. Archos possesses perfect global coordination, and so when the killing begins, it is near-total and so swift that humanity hardly knows what's coming. These presage the war that is to come.īut the war, when it arrives, is far more brutal than Wilson hints. A series of small, grisly episodes follow in which automation systems are compromised by Archos and domestic robots, autonomous cars, and other devices turn on their owners. After this bit of stage setting, we go back to the months before the war, when a researcher unwittingly creates Archos and then loses control of it when it murders him. Robopocalypse opens on the first days after the terrible robot war, with Cormack Wallace, a human soldier, contemplating a 'black box' containing the war's history as recorded by Archos, the rogue AI that nearly exterminated the human race.

But his new novel, Robopocalypse, is anything but fun and lightweight: it's a gripping, utterly plausible, often terrifying account of a global apocalypse brought on by a transcendant AI that hijacks the planet's automation systems and uses them in a vicious attempt to wipe out humanity. Daniel Wilson is a PhD roboticist who made his name with a series of fun, light science books about robot uprisings and similar subjects.

Daniel wilson robopocalypse