Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill

Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Read as an audio book.

This was interesting and engaging. A "meaning of life" story though the eyes of robots/artificial intelligence's; a story of survival, friendship, mortality and having a soul.

I'll start with the narrator - well done performance. Each character had its own "voice", and while I didn't agree with all the accents, it worked for the purposes of the story and nothing grated on my nerves.

The story is about Brittle, a former care-giver robot who is now scavenging parts from The Sea of Rust - an area roughly in former Ohio that has become a desiccated, deserted desert. The world has been decimated by the robots in their quest to eradicate humans - which they did, along with all biological life on the planet. Now robots try and eke out an existence while avoiding the battle between the One World Intelligence's who are systematically uploading robots to their mainframes (or some such) creating basically a hive mind. Brittle, fighting for her own survival and facing imminent parts failure is caught up in a quest for a third World Mind who wants to ensure the survival of AI's.

Things I quite enjoyed - it's all robots. All sorts of different robots struggling for survival in various means and ways. The plot just rolls along and the reader rolls along with it. It made for a very enjoyable commute - no shouting in the car, no pounding of fists on the steering wheel, just an engaging story.

A handful of things seemed incongruous and didn't quite work for me: the frequency Brittle swore using "fuck" and "shit". In a future world, I would have expected a robot to use it's own terminology. There were all these little enclaves of robots, yet no robot was manufacturing parts for other robots?

It was emphasized that robots really couldn't overwrite - so to speak - their base programming. Yet Brittle seemed to have no problem not giving a crap about anyone but herself. That seemed a bit incongruous with her programming.

The last think I'll talk about is the robots refering to themselves as "people" or "persons" - human terminology. Early in the story Brittle used the term "citizen", which seemed more apropos for AI's living in an AI world. There were other instances similar to that and combined, threw me out of the flow of the story.

Overall, an easy to listen to story that kept me engaged, held interesting concepts, and had a good performance by the narrator. Recommended.

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