Rating: 1.75/5 
So it comes as no surprise that Steven Spielberg snared the movie rights to Daniel H. Wilson’s debut novel Robopocalypse before the book was even finished. After all, with a Ph.D. in robotics, Wilson literally wrote the (faux) guidebook on How to Survive a Robot Uprising, so one would hope that — with his first stab at fiction — he’d shed new light on the familiar ground of machines overthrowing their masters. Instead, Robopocalypse’s lone redeeming quality is that it should make for a seamless transition to celluloid considering that it’s comprised primarily of action sequences written as if they were a novelization of an already existing film. Wilson’s cinematic prose conjures vivid imagery, but comes off as cold and unfeeling as, well, a robot.
Wilson frames his novel as a series of mostly first person accounts about the rise of the malevolent machine mastermind Archos and his assault on humankind during “Zero Hour” and the ensuing “New War.” These chronicles are pieced together by Cormac “Bright Boy” Wallace from the black box that remains after Archos’ defeat in his radioactive arctic lair. Archos had been a tricky bastard, initially turning elevators into deathtraps, sicking heat-seeking smart cars on the general populace and transforming legions of helper robots into efficient battalions.
The members of the human resistance come from such varying backgrounds that they seem deliberately hodgepodge: there’s the Japanese engineer, the soldier in Afghanistan, the Native American sheriff, a deft computer hacker in London, the child of an American politician and even a “reborn” robot itself. Though only a few survive, all play crucial roles in the eventual defeat of Archos. Despite a fetishist’s focus on the specific builds and movements of the ever-evolving machines as they crush windpipes, tear off faces or burrow into flesh and detonate, Wilson’s characters speak as though their words originated from an assembly line. Dialogue is used almost exclusively for exposition or cliché (Archos’ doomed creator actually says, “My god, what have I done?”) and each first person account has the same penchant for unrealistically florid language and egregious overuse of the one-sentence paragraph. After all, what young child would say something like, “A wave of red-orange pulses radiate toward me.”
The chance of humans successfully overthrowing a viral villain who can turn something as benign as a toy doll against its owner seems remote, especially in this not-too-distant future where society relies on robotic assistance for everything from romantic companionship to warfare. As a result, Wilson keeps Archos’ motives oblique as the robot monster states that he could nuke the world if destruction was his only aim. But Wilson largely ignores other modes of death at Archos’ disposal, namely the world’s aircraft and military technology. A few planes drop from the sky during Zero Hour, but throughout much of the war a patch of rough terrain proves sufficient enough to keep the robots at bay.
The action sequences are admittedly vivid. They’re engaging in the same way as a Michael Bay film, reliant on flash and noise and creatively violent scenarios. The human characters themselves rarely exhibit much humanity. Absent are the inherent confusion and panic that would grip people in a robot apocalypse. Everyone is far too analytic and able to comprehend the machinations of the apocalypse even as the sky is falling. There’s no shock, no doubt, no internal conflicts. There are no emotional connections or even anyone to root for. And given that we know the war’s result from the outset, there’s no real tension. We’ll have to wait until 2013 to see how many tens of millions Robopocalypse manages to rake in at the box office, but for now we know the novel is a clunker.
