Review Me Twice - Robopocalypse by Daniel Wilson

See the great thing about working at my job is sometimes, you just trip over great books.  This time, I happened to trip over a great book's sequel.

This is the cover to Robogenesis, the sequel to Robopocalypse.

Awesome, right?  I thought so too, and after looking at it for weeks, I finally picked it up and read the inside cover... only to discover that I had to read a different one first.  I mentioned this to a co-worker, who immediately told me I should read Robopocalypse because I would enjoy it.

And I did so much!  It has very much a World War Z feel to it (which Alex and I ADORE), in the sense that it's lots of people's stories about how humanity came together and fought the machines.  And Wilson's writing is great.  He keeps you on edge and you can't really seem to put the book down because you REALLY want to know what's going to happen.

Even though it's one of those books that tells you what's going to happen on page one.

Also, Wilson wins for my favorite quote of the year:

"Stop.  You have to stop.  You're making a mistake.  We'll never give up Archos.  We'll destroy you."
"A threat?"
"A warning.  We aren't what we seem.  Human beings will do anything to live.  Anything."

Archos is the computer that starts it all, that goes after all the humans and starts to kill them, eradicate them.  And here, right in the very beginning, his creator warns him.  The machines aren't going to win.  Humanity is going to win, because at the end of the day, we never stop.  And I just LOVED that whole quote, the whole exchange, because it just rang so true.  It happens in every day life, in movies, in books.  There are a million accounts of humans fighting until the bitter end in a way that other animals just... don't.

Really, the book was just well done.  It wasn't over the top.  It wasn't made to seem unrealistic.  This made me feel like a Robot apocalypse could actually happen.

If you recall, I mentioned on Wednesday that I don't much care for stories about robots in general, especially robot uprisings. It's just not my thing. I find it really interesting, actually, that I probably would have written a very different post for yesterday if I had written it before I finished Robopocalypse. Because I loved this book.

It is absolutely the World War Z of robot stories. I believe, if given the chance, it could bring about a renewal of interest in robot fiction. It has the multiple, interconnected perspectives, worldwide scope, disaster content, and writing pace of World War Z, which were some of the things that made WWZ better than most zombie fiction.

This will undoubtedly be one of my "best books we read in 2014" picks.