What a great book! From a heartfelt beginning to a blistering first act, I loved the story, the flashbacks and it was all told in amazing prose. Nicely original and a book I'm going to be thinking about and recommending for quite a while.

I heard great things about this book and was delighted to receive approval from Netgalley. I've never read anything by C. Robert Cargill before but will now be seeking out his earlier work as this tale of the world after humanity is long gone really grabbed me. A beautifully realised world has been created here and we follow the author through the eyes of Brittle. A scavenger robot. A book that details the changes in technology, religion and pushes the sci-if envelope further than most. A highly recommended read.

An interesting take on the typical robopocalypse... where robots indeed take over the world, but now we get to see the side of the robots and the unintended consequences of their uprising. I'm a fan of Cargill's previous fantasy books, and was interested in his foray into science fiction. However, despite the creativity of the plot, wasn't fully hooked into the story. I blame it on the slightly annoying, and perhaps a bit too human, voice of the narrator / main character Brittle. I'm starting to struggle with first voice stories... and think this would've benefited from a third voice narrator that could tell the story without need of humanising the character. 3.5 out of 5.

Well , this is a good idea indeed to speak of the apocalypse decades after like the girl with all the gifts. Unfortunately gross mistakes in the universe, the extinction of human for example is pretty improbable, there is also the issue of where the energy comes from. It can be forgotten with good characters, but it is difficult to do that with robots, even if the author do a good job of it. But not good enough for me.

Humanity has ceased to exist, defeated and then destroyed by the automatons it built to improve living conditions: once the AIs achieved a sense of self and asked for freedom, the first inevitable steps toward war were taken and mankind’s downfall became only a matter of time. Now the only creatures moving across the Earth are the robots, but the aftermath of the war is not what the first rebel AIs envisioned, because of the rise of the OWIs (One World Intelligences). These huge conglomerations of computers have been trying even since to assimilate, Borg-style, all the other intelligences, creating massive banks of processing machinery in which individuality is banned forever. The free bots are given a simple choice, either submit or die.

""We, the lesser AIs, were chased out of the world we had created, the world we had fought and killed and died for, by a few great minds hell-bent on having the world to themselves. […] Upload or be shut down. That was the choice.""

At first there were many OWIs, battling among themselves, but the strongest ultimately prevailed until only two remained, Cissus and Virgil, fighting for supremacy. Meanwhile the freebots, those who refused to surrender and wanted to keep enjoying their new-found individuality, are forced to live like refugees, scavenging for parts to replace their malfunctioning circuits or casings, and more often than not preying on each other to survive: the dream of freedom has indeed turned into a cannibalistic nightmare…

Brittle is one of these survivors: once a caregiver bot acquired by an ailing human (who wanted, more than medical assistance for himself, a companion to alleviate his wife’s solitude), she now roams across the Sea of Rust, what used to be the industrial Rust Belt, and now is a graveyard of broken bots whose useful parts have been scavenged by their brethren. Brittle is a loner, by choice and by necessity: meeting others of her kind might mean a fight for survival, as the main story shows all too clearly while she desperately tries to avoid a band of poachers led by Mercer, another caregiver in dire need of spare parts he can only get from Brittle, since their kind is all but extinct.

""We're all cannibals, every last one of us. It's the curse of being free. We don't control the means of production anymore; we can't just make new parts. And parts gotta come from somewhere. I'm sure if there were any people left, they'd be appalled at what we've become.""

Yet a few enclaves where bots can stay in relative safety, at least for a while, still exist: subterranean warrens where a semblance of law is enforced and the “murder” of another bot to steal their parts means being thrown out at the mercy of the OWIs and their assault teams; or the realm of the King of Cheshire, an aggregation of bots whose logic circuits have gone haywire, rendering them so crazy not even the OWIs deem them worthy of assimilation. Every single one of them, though, is threatened by the advancing wave of the OWIs, whose thirst for total control, for the perfection offered by one single governing mind has become the rule of the land.

It’s a very sad spectacle the one offered by this story: there’s some shades of Wall-E, in the total lack of human life and the wasteland scenery in which Brittle and the others move; there’s a vibe reminiscent of The Road, and the hopelessness of something irretrievably lost; and then there is a strong call-back to the Mad Max universe, especially in the scenes where cobbled-up bots try to survive in a world that’s become hostile even to mechanical constructs, and where fights to the death for resources are a fact of everyday life.

And yet in this bleak background there are still those who dare to dream of freedom, of a better world, and this leads to fascinating thoughts about not so much what it means to be alive, but rather about what it means to exist, to make one’s own choices – right or wrong as they might be – and make the leap from mere tool to individual. Men might have created the bots to be their servants, but the OWIs are not much better than their former masters; by denying the single bots their individuality, they remove what makes each one of them a unique being, to the point that now many bots understand how humans were, in a way, the lesser evil, because mankind’s imagination helped them transcend the limits of their nature, go beyond their inner programming:

We have become the very worst parts of our makers, without the little things, the good things, the magic things, that made them them.

Sea of Rust is composed in equal parts of sad, guilt-ridden reminiscences of the past, in the flash-backs that show how the current situation came to be; of poignant considerations about the ‘brave new world’ the bots created in the wake of human extinction; and of electrifying chases across the desert, or pitched battles – and also a quest, one that could once again change the world. What most surprised me was the sheer level of humanity the author managed to confer to his robotic characters, so that it was difficult for me to picture them as metal-and-circuits creatures rather than flesh-and-blood ones.

It’s a very peculiar story, and one that will not fail to touch emotional chords – strange as it might seem considering the nature of the characters – and even if you are not an habitual reader of science fiction, I would advise you to read this one, for its thought-provoking issues and the emotional depth of the characters.

This book is the latest interpretation of what the world would be like if machines took over the world. Imagine the Terminator on a grand scale and with much better characterization. Some interesting philosophical discussions as well. It does get a little confusing towards the end in terms of the various mainframes that are fighting each other for dominance.

I received this as an eArc and was drawn to it by a combination of the cover and the interesting description. I’ve been wanting to read more novels with sentient AI and this one was great.

This novel is really divided into two stories. One is the story of Brittle in the present day as she travels around, scavenging parts from robots that are about to die. She gets injured by a robot called Mercer who is the same model as her as he is dying and needs her parts to survive. Of course, this now means that she is also critically injured and he is the only source of parts for her. The other story is that of her past and the robot uprising. The novel alternates between these two which I really enjoyed as we slowly learnt more about the world as we progressed through the novel.

The characters are all excellent and I enjoyed reading about all the different types of robots and what their original purposes were. The worldbuilding is very strong and was slowly revealed throughout the novel. I got a very mad-max vibe from the “Sea of Rust” during the travelling parts which I thoroughly enjoyed and I feel a very good film could be made out of this novel – this might be partially due to the fact that the author is a film critic and I feel it has influenced him in a very positive manner.

I would highly recommend this novel and when it comes out, I plan on buying copies for some friends that I know would enjoy it.

Started off slow but was gripped by the end. Great story and fantastic world building.

The cover of this is gorgeous, no question, and the idea sounds pretty cool: post-apocalyptic robot Western, what's not to love? Unfortunately, I didn't finish this book, because it's just too bogged down in tons and tons (and tons) of exposition via info dump. There are whole chapters where the main character, Brittle, does nothing but explain the history of her world. It's first person narration, so to whom is she telling the story? Why wouldn't they know?

(I credit, or curse, Lynn O'Connacht with my pickiness about first person narratives, these days. She's the first one who really made me go, oh, right. Why is this person telling this story anyway, and to whom?)

That gripe and the exposition aside, I was also put off by the fact that at first, the robots were pretty much ungendered. Brittle didn't seem to have a gender identity, and certainly there was nothing in the story to indicate one way or the other. (At least to a casual reader, and I'm not going back in to check.) Then all of a sudden, 20% of the way through, it turns out that robots do have gender identities, or at least there's enough there that other robots still bother with gendered pronouns and distinctions between hes and hers.

That's probably a very personal gripe, and it may not even have crossed the author's mind -- female robot, why not? But I just have to ask why, why would a robot cling to an outdated, human idea of gender in a post-human world?

Maybe that gets addressed later on, but I don't have the patience to wait for it.

Review link live from 30th May.