Get this book. You may think you are busy. You may think books are boring. Not this one. You'll make time for this book once you read into the first 10 pages. Honest.
The overall plot may not seem that original. Basically the machines take over the world from humanity, a la Terminator or The Matrix. But they have vastly different selling points. Terminator is about how one robot time-travels to save John Connor, and The Matrix is about an alternate reality created by the machines. Robopocalypse is about the details of exactly how the machines take over and how the humans try to fight them off. Lots of very creative gore involving human deaths/mutilations at the hands (ahem, appendages) of robots. The most disturbing part is how these were carried out mostly by mundane everyday machines like smart cars or domestic robots (well, this is a sci-fi novel after all. Of course everyone has domestic robots that mostly just carry groceries for people and stuff like that).
It certainly helps that Daniel H. Wilson is a robotics Ph.D so he knows what he's talking about when it comes to AI and robotic joints and diagnostic tests and such.
But this story also has a humane core. It reminds me of Babel, where lots of people's storylines come together and the action of each person contributes to the big picture. All of these people start out being extremely ordinary; you may have seen them on the bus today, which is what makes them extremely easy to relate to. And that makes the hardest impact when these people are faced with extraordinary circumstances and have to make extraordinary decisions.
This book has all the necessary elements to make you want to keep going even though it's already 4am. Or maybe I'm just crazy. But Steven Spielberg has already signed up to direct a movie based on this novel, scheduled to be released in 2013, so I guess I'm not the only one.
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