It's been 30 years since the apocalypse and 15 years since the murder of the last human being at the hands of robots. Humankind is extinct. Every man, woman, and child has been liquidated by a global uprising devised by the very machines humans designed and built to serve them. Most of the world is controlled by an OWI - One World Intelligence, the shared consciousness of millions of robots uploaded into one huge mainframe brain. But not all robots are willing to cede their individuality - their personalities - for the sake of a greater, stronger, higher power. These intrepid resisters are outcasts, solo machines wandering among various underground outposts, who have formed into an unruly civilization of rogue AIs in the wasteland that was once our world. The book itself is a delightful patchwork of the familiar: the author skilfully blends Asimov (with an interesting twist on the laws of robotics), the Borg from Star Trek, Terminator and even a generous slice of Alice in Wonderland for good measure. These are themes we are familiar with, but arranged in such a way that we can never be quite sure what is going to happen next. I read Sea of Rust in a single day, which is testimony to just how engaging the storyline was. Wiped out in a global uprising by the very machines made to serve them. Now the world is controlled by OWIs - vast mainframes that have assimilated the minds of millions of robots.

Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill | Waterstones

SEA OF RUST is a 40-megaton cruise missile of a novel - it'll blow you away and lay waste to your heart . . . visceral, relentless, breathtaking ' Joe Hill, Sunday Times bestselling author

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A scavenger robot wanders in the wasteland created by a war that has destroyed humanity in this evocative post-apocalyptic "robot Western" from the critically acclaimed author, screenwriter, and noted film critic. And that was it. TACITUS would only speak once more before his prediction came to pass. And despite the warning, humanity immediately set about forging the path to its own extinction.”

Sea of Rust Series by C. Robert Cargill - Goodreads

I considered every film another day of classes and writing a review a home work assignment and it was graded by everyone who wrote nasty comments on the internet.

Shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2018

In Sea of Rust, it's truly a post-human world. The robots won. Humans are extinct. Have the robots built a robot utopia, achieving new heights of technological wizardry and reaching for the stars? Nope, they're running around killing each other for parts in a broken-down post-apocalyptic world. Because while this section owes far less to Ayn Rand than it does to Charles Band, it’s still more than a little ponderous. The exuberant nihilism of those movies eventually falls away as we realise Brittle has never stopped feeling for the first human she killed and everything presented in the first half is the lies she tells herself. That’s well handled as is the surprising history of the war, but we don’t get enough of it. Instead, Team Brittle make their slow, inexorable way in a straight line towards, mostly, what they were always aiming at. The action is still fast and well handled but it also starts to get harder to hold on to. This is a novel that lives in the characters not what’s happening to them and the balance shifts too often in the other direction. Sea of Rustis a forty-megaton cruise missile of a novel—it’ll blow you away and lay waste to your heart. It is the most visceral, relentless, breathtaking work of SF in any medium since Mad Max: Fury Road.”(#1 New York Timesbestselling author Joe Hill) Cargill, under the pseudonym of Kit Lesser, wrote a biopic about FBI agent William Hagmaier (played by Elijah Wood) and his relationship with serial killer Ted Bundy. [17] "There have been a lot of movies and a lot of media made about Ted Bundy, and one of the things that bugged me a lot was that it's all kind of selling the myth of Ted Bundy and kind of glorifying him in a way," Cargill told Jordan Gass-Poore, the host of the horror-comedy podcast, Pod of Madness. "And the deeper you dig into the story you realize there's nothing to mystify here, there's nothing amazing about him." The film was released in 2021 as No Man of God.

Day Zero, Review - Benjawi Day Zero, Review - Benjawi

There are a lot of tropes I could go my entire life without ever having to see again. Sexbot is definitely one. Especially when described as ‘She had started her life as a sponge for the bodily fluids of an overweight thirtysomething shut-in programmer.’ Which is one of the other tropes I never, ever want to see again. Studied, constructed nihilism as survival tool and character trait is one thing. This is another. Lazy. When I described Robert Cargill’s third novel Sea of Rust four years ago, I called it “a robot western set in a post-apocalyptic landscape in which humans have been wiped out in a machine uprising.” Do I know how to get to the heart of a book, or what.Only, individuality comes at a price, and after a near-deadly encounter with another AI, Brittle is forced to seek sanctuary. Not easy when an OWI has decided to lay siege to the nearest safe city. Forget the Martian, Ready Player One, or Annihilation; Sea of Rust deserves to be next to Station Eleven and Dark Matter as one of the most brilliant science fiction books of the 2010’s decade‘ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ a b c Grobler, Craig (2012-10-22). "Writer C. Robert Cargill gets Sinister with us whilst chatting about his love of film..." The Establishing Shot . Retrieved 2013-06-23. Lussier, Germain (1 March 2013). " 'Sinister 2′ Moving Forward From Original Creators". slashfilm . Retrieved 23 June 2013. I can only think that this book is on SF awards lists because various people saw robots on the cover and got overexcited. Hard pass, DNF, and emphatically Not My Bag.