#crobertcargill

2/8/19

Written by C. Robert Cargill

Sea of Rust is a novel published in 2017 about a lone robot nicknamed “Brittle” who scavenges the wastes of the post-apocalypse after the extinction of humanity. After AI technology evolved and became out of control of its human creators, certain robots and supercomputers stood up to their former masters resulting in a war leaving nothing but bots behind. This is a common premise in fiction and sci-fi these days, but Sea of Rust does little to stand out from ideas like this explored for decades. Think of it as a first-person account of a robot roaming the wastelands after SkyNet won the war in the Terminator franchise. 

While many robots remain individuals with levels of independence and personal agency, the supercomputers who began the revolution are still attempting to assimilate all bots into their “One World Intelligence” which is the equivalent of dying and becoming one of the infinite sheep in some sort of AI afterlife. This OWI is equipped with thousands of bots as foot soldiers (known as “facets”) and act as one of the main antagonistic forces against Brittle and her struggle to survive. She collects parts from dead, dying, or insane robots which she uses to maintain herself. One of my main problems with the story is how similar robots are to humans. We follow Brittle from a mostly first-person perspective as we hear her thoughts, emotions, and other cognitive depths. 

A small shift in this story is all it would take to simply change all the leftover robots into humans, as the robots aren’t personified in a way that makes them feel entirely different from humanity. I would expect this coming from a human writer (obviously) but the story is not clever enough to really make itself as interesting as it could have been. This may have been a Mad Max off shoot story about a scavenger trying to stay alive in the violent deserts of a post-apocalypse. Hell, many of the robots aren’t even robotic as Spock, or other famous logical characters regarded as robotic. The lore even contains the typical prophet robot Isaac who first began to question himself and have self-awareness enough to cause concern. When Isaac eventually rallies enough robots into the beginnings of a revolution, humanity nukes them with a massive EMP bomb, killing them, welding them into place, and inadvertently turning the site into holy grounds. 

Even the idea of using hardware as near 1:1 analogies to human parts feels unoriginal. It’s like you’re explaining a computer to your Grandma; “so the RAM is like your most recent and short term memory that is called upon easily, but the MEMORY is your true collection of thoughts and experiences from your entire life.” Brittle and other robots she meets, friend or foe, all refer to themselves like this, and also include parts like processors, batteries, and other tech hardware they must maintain or replace to stay alive. Brittle talks about how uploading to the OWI is like giving up all individuality, and becoming a slave to a massive AI collection. The more time bots spend independent of each other, the more uniqueness sprouts within them. Their original programming can be rewired based on experiences. I can see a shred of a theme going on with that sort of stuff, but the author doesn’t spend near enough time in this department, and Sea of Rust ends up being less cerebral than it easily could have been.

The background of how exactly the robots became independent and how the supercomputers were created was probably my favorite part of the book, contained in flashbacks between chapters in Brittle’s current day life. She spends time searching for good parts as spending too much time in the sun can literally fry their drives. Brittle is written as a gray character, as sometimes she outright tricks innocent and benevolent bots out of their parts by promising to fix them while they shut down, only to shut them down and steal their parts, leaving their husks to bake in the wasteland. She has that gritty side of her, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen out of a morally ambiguous hero a thousand times in sci-fi before. None of the side characters are particularly interesting, and the whole story ends up feeling very anticlimactic. After a few run ins with other factions and several battles with your typical laser weapons and flying ships, Brittle doesn’t end up changing much in her world or the world itself. I struggle to recommend Sea of Rust to anyone other than teenagers, or people who don’t typically read sci-fi or spend much time with post-apocalypse fiction whether it be in film, video games, comics, or novels.