Ratings24
Average rating3.8
Sea of Rust meets Wall-E meets A.I. (the film).
By which I mean the dystopian cynicism comes through more strongly than the charm of a hapless robot trying to find its purpose amidst the remains of humanity. Perhaps it's just the proliferation of discussion on this topic or my desire to always find a good robot book, either I'm getting pickier or it's getting harder to find stories on this subject that don't feel like not-too-wild-variances on the same theme. To go further into detail would be spoilers but these plot beats, even the discussions had, don't feel like new ground. I can appreciate the somewhat upbeat ending. I understand why Tchaikovsky did what he did, but the pacing did start to drag toward the latter half/last third of the book.
Further observations:
Something about Wonk's speech in the central library archive feels like the disillusionment of corruptible Communist Russia when the glorious revolution didn't make things better. There's just a lot of ‘of course everything is terrible because: humans'. Which is a valid theme, especially in dystopian fiction, but one I don't tend to read because it doesn't really offer anything constructive or entertaining, and gets very repetitive and predictable very fast.
Not sure I can forgive the author the perversion of the library/archive concept, though it was among the more powerful illustrations of how programming could go wrong.
I'm fairly certain Tchaikovsky was doing something clever with author names and the number/letter coding titles of the parts of the book and the themes of the parts therein, but I'm not quite clever enough to be sure.