ROBOPOCALYPSE by D. H. Wilson

'Wilson, Daniel H. Robopocalypse''. ''' New York: Doubleday, 2011. Also available as an audiobook through Audible.com, narrated by Mike Chamberlain (12 hours, 43 minutes .

As with How to Survive a Robot Uprising, Robopocalypse involves a fairly straight-forward extrapolation — and a small number of very big leaps — from current robot technology (DWH has a PhD from from Carnegie Mellon in robotics and has done his homework). See for a computer intelligence like Colossus in THE FORBIN PROJECT or Skynet in the TERMINATOR series taking over everyday machines, but more so for the leaps, where we get machine consciousness and self-consciousness, and melds between human consciousness and that of machines. Of special interest is this novel's handling plausibly (in context) the freeing of some robots from the control of Archos, the "rogue A.I." and Colossus/Skynet figure. Some parts of the novel are narrated by Nine Oh Two "the first recorded freeborn humanoid robot to be recorded," to quote the Wikipedia entry. Memorable for robots using human bodies as a layer of meat protection (and production of a kind of robozombie); more signiifcant for Archos's goal of eliminating humans, or at least "human civilization[,] in an attempt to preserve Earth's biodiversity" (Wikipedia, "Plot"), and having Native-American characters elements of Native-American culture at the human center of the novel.

3. FICTION, RDE, 17/VII/13