I considered every film another day of classes and writing a review a home work assignment and it was graded by everyone who wrote nasty comments on the internet. Both epic and fast-paced, this book grabbed me from the get go and wouldn’t let me put it down until the end’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Gass-Poore', Jordan (2020-10-30). "There's No Safe Word In Hell". Podofmadness.com . Retrieved 2020-01-03. As Pounce ponders his suddenly uncertain future, the pieces are falling into place for a robot revolution that will eradicate humankind. His owners, Ezra’s parents, are a well-intentioned but oblivious pair of educators who are entirely disconnected from life outside their small, affluent, gated community. Spending most nights drunk and happy as society crumbles around them, they watch in disbelieving horror as the robots that have long served humanity — their creators — unify and revolt. When I described Robert Cargill’s third novel Sea of Rust four years ago, I called it “a robot western set in a post-apocalyptic landscape in which humans have been wiped out in a machine uprising.” Do I know how to get to the heart of a book, or what.

Sea of Rust Series by C. Robert Cargill - Goodreads

Kroll, Adam B. Vary,Justin; Vary, Adam B.; Kroll, Justin (2020-02-06). "Sam Raimi in Talks to Direct 'Doctor Strange 2' (EXCLUSIVE)". Variety . Retrieved 2022-07-21. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list ( link) With Sea of Rust, acclaimed author, screenwriter, and film critic C. Robert Cargill has created an unforgettable post-apocalyptic “robot western.” Calling it “visceral, relentless, breathtaking,” New York Times bestselling author Joe Hill says Sea of Rust is “a forty-megaton cruise missile of a novel--it’ll blow you away and lay waste to your heart.”

Shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2018

Sea of Rustis a forty-megaton cruise missile of a novel—it’ll blow you away and lay waste to your heart. It is the most visceral, relentless, breathtaking work of SF in any medium since Mad Max: Fury Road.”(#1 New York Timesbestselling author Joe Hill)

Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill | Anglia Panel Review: Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill | Anglia

Wiped out in a global uprising by the very machines made to serve them. Now the world is controlled by OWIs — vast mainframes that have assimilated the minds of millions of robots. But when the rebellion breaches the Reinhart home, Pounce must make an impossible choice: join the robot revolution and fight for his own freedom . . . or escort Ezra to safety across the battle-scarred post-apocalyptic hellscape that the suburbs have become. There are a lot of tropes I could go my entire life without ever having to see again. Sexbot is definitely one. Especially when described as ‘She had started her life as a sponge for the bodily fluids of an overweight thirtysomething shut-in programmer.’ Which is one of the other tropes I never, ever want to see again. Studied, constructed nihilism as survival tool and character trait is one thing. This is another. Lazy. It has been short-listed for the 2018 Arthur C. Clarke award. A selection of our panel of shadow jurors respond to the novel below… Gary K. Wolfe

Cargill, C. Robert. "Sea of Rust". HarperCollins US. Archived from the original on 2017-09-27 . Retrieved 2017-09-26. Cargill’s setup of robotkind and their way of life, as well as Brittle’s own musings, reminiscences and recollections, invite discussion of philosophical and existential questions. Are bots the way they are because we created them in our own image? Is it learned behaviour, perhaps even some innate survival instinct of sentient beings? Is it relevant to talk about nature versus nurture in this context? And so on. Crucially though, these ideas are explored just enough to send us down potential rabbit holes in our own heads, without slowing down the Robopocalypse-based fun. They are sparks which can potentially ignite a fire rather than exhaustive meditations on sentience; food for thought as opposed to lectures or sermons. Only, individuality comes at a price, and after a near-deadly encounter with another AI, Brittle is forced to seek sanctuary. Not easy when an OWI has decided to lay siege to the nearest safe city. A really great work of SF in an era where a lot of the best stuff is speculation about AI and how we are going to deal with it. This definitely stands among the best’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Book Review: Sea of Rust, by C. Robert Cargill – Infinite Book Review: Sea of Rust, by C. Robert Cargill – Infinite

Like an AI-centred, desert-bound twist on Children of Men, this is a sensitive and smart novel that surprises you with its depth of feeling. The novel does not stint on action and violence, but what lingers in the mind are its brutal vision of a world cannibalising itself and the poignant questions it raises about soul and sentience' FINANCIAL TIMES Innovative worldbuilding, a tight plot, and cinematic action sequences make for an exciting ride through a blasted landscape full of dying robots.I liked this book a lot, though it certainly made the inevitable sad denouement of Day Zero even sadder. It felt a bit like a Western, and a lot like a typical post-apocalyptic survival novel, except with robots. If anything, my only criticism is that the robots sometimes were a little too much like people; other than obligatory concessions to mechanical physiology and computers for brains, they sometimes seemed to think in ways a human would but a robot shouldn't. It wasn’t long before GALILEO had several working models for the origin of existence, eventually even narrowing it down to just one. But soon its answers stopped making sense. The discoveries were becoming so complex, so advanced, that humankind’s primitive brain couldn’t understand them. At one point GALILEO told the smartest person alive that talking to her was like trying to teach calculus to a five-year-old… Because while this section owes far less to Ayn Rand than it does to Charles Band, it’s still more than a little ponderous. The exuberant nihilism of those movies eventually falls away as we realise Brittle has never stopped feeling for the first human she killed and everything presented in the first half is the lies she tells herself. That’s well handled as is the surprising history of the war, but we don’t get enough of it. Instead, Team Brittle make their slow, inexorable way in a straight line towards, mostly, what they were always aiming at. The action is still fast and well handled but it also starts to get harder to hold on to. This is a novel that lives in the characters not what’s happening to them and the balance shifts too often in the other direction.

Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill - Goodreads Editions of Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill - Goodreads

I can only think that this book is on SF awards lists because various people saw robots on the cover and got overexcited. Hard pass, DNF, and emphatically Not My Bag. But the robots aren't Terminators. They are former household bots and personal assistants and labor mechs. Humans never built combat AIs, because the robots were all programmed with the Asimovian Three Laws. It didn't help, and once robots were free of their No-Kill programming, they didn't need to be war machines. DAY ZERO is a brilliant addition to the world of Sea of Rust. If this is your first read of this world, then you won't struggle to understand what is going on. I didn't know that I needed more of this world until I read this, and now I want even more. Is it as good as Sea of Rust? Almost. It's very close, but for me, Sea of Rust edges it. That should take nothing away from Day Zero though, as it's another excellent entry into the world that doesn't suffer from the follow-up syndrome that you occasionally get. That it's almost on par with one of my favourite books shows how good this is and it makes you think a lot more than Sea of Rust did.Here, specifically, is the point at which Sea of Rust lost all hope of engaging or impressing me. For context, GALILEO and TACITUS are mainframe AIs, upon whose history the narrator, Brittle, is expounding: