Robopocalypse’s’ human survivors rage against the machine

• Doubleday

Filmmaker Stephen Spielberg committed to direct the adaptation of Robopocalypse in October of 2010. Daniel H. Wilson’s sci-fi novel wasn’t published until June 7 of this year, but maybe Spielberg’s “precogs” from Minority Report told him it would be a hit.

It always annoys me a little when publishers release books presold as movies-to-be, since it makes the publishing business feel like an extension of Hollywood. As the source of the 2013 film release of America’s most successful movie director, Robopocalypse arrives pre-annointed as a significant novel, and it feels scarcely relevant whether it lives up to the hype. For what it’s worth, Robopocalypse turns out to be an exciting and imaginative technothriller, like the kind the late Michael Crichton used to write.

Robopocalypse resembles Max Brooks’ entertaining bestseller World War Z, only if you searched the manuscript for the word “zombie” and replaced it with “robot.” Like Brooks, Wilson previously wrote a satirical handbook about surviving a sci-fi apocalypse, then used his research as raw material for a sprawling, multi-character novel. Robopocalypse takes place in the near future, but many of the book’s military, industrial or domestic robots seem technologically plausible. The servant robot model called “Big Happy” sounds like a taller, more sophisticated version of the Asimo.