Title: Sea of Rust
Author: C. Robert Cargill
Genre: Sci-fi; Dystopian
Book Length: 274 Pages (print)
Format Read: eBook
Year Published: September 5, 2017

Date Started: May 18, 2024
Date finished: June 3, 2024

This story follows Brittle, a robot wandering the earth who encounters other AIs. Together they discover the demise of humans and learn how robots share parts to stay intact and functional longer.

This story felt chaotic and messy, plus there wasn’t enough focus on why Brittle wanted to survive or live through this world. Apparently, all humans were extinct, however, I recall Brittle and her companions coming across a human losing his mind, running away from them. There was also a scene where a robot tricked another robot for his parts. I didn’t really understand the purpose of that because, again, I didn’t know what the reason was for them to want to live. I did enjoy how the robot was programmed to deceive the other robot. However, I found the concept of robots being sentient or having emotions a bit odd because it wasn’t explained how this came to be. Additionally, throughout the story, I assumed Brittle was a male robot because the characteristics seemed masculine to me.

I believe this story could have benefited from a different approach. It felt torn between depicting war and chaos and focusing on the robots’ quest for a “human-like” consciousness. This made the story feel disjointed and confusing. While I’m all for sentient-like robots and the journey to achieving sentience, this story failed to offer insights into that process.

Who should read this book: If you enjoy stories with and about robots, you might enjoy this one. I might consider this book leaning toward hard sci-fi, but I wouldn’t classify it all as hard sci-fi because the robots’ emotions and sentient thinking makes it soft sci-fi.