Daniel Wilson’s new novel Robopocalypse has been getting a lot of press lately and not just for it’s catchy title. I saw it on several best seller and best reviewed lists as well as hearing about a possible movie. The reviews made it sound like a combination of World War Z and Terminator. So, I have to admit some surprise that I was disappointed by the novel. It wasn’t bad, but it definitely wasn’t as good as the reviews made it sound like. Let’s see what went wrong.

The basic premise of the book is that a scientist, Professor Wasserman, is working to create an artificial intelligence named Archos. He is on his fourteenth version of it and they are all turning out mean and anti-human. But he makes a mistake which lets this fourteenth version escape. Once it escapes, it starts slowly taking over all the electronic machinery and robots (humanoid and non-humanoid) across the world. The book goes chapter by chapter jumping from one person to another to show important events from after the AI’s escape to the Zero Hour where the robots take over to the final battle between man and machine.

The characters we meet include a U.S. Congresswoman with her two daughters, a young English hacker, a Japanese robotics engineer who lives with a love robot who could me mistaken for his wife, a robot maintenance soldier in Afghanistan among others. As the months go by, we jump into seeing what one character is doing before jumping forward in time to see another character. Each chapter ends with a life lesson on why what the character just did was (or could have been) important. This format lets us see what’s going on around the world and the different efforts to prevent or stop the Robopocalypse.

The story itself is straight forward and a quick read. The plot is well designed, but I did have a few questions (such as the original scientist not have a hard power off on Archos). I wasn’t that thrilled with the characterizations as most of the characters were basically flat with not enough time spent developing them. But, by far, the biggest issue I had was with the little learnings at the end of each chapter. Each chapter ends with a sentence or two explaining why what we just read was important. I felt like I was reading class notes from a college course where the teacher finishes each lesson with a brief summary of what, from the current lesson, is going to be on the test. It became annoying very quickly, but continued on and on. I enjoyed the book, but it was not nearly as good as many of the other reviews I have seen. Mildly recommended.