These days, even the humans are built by robots.Charlie7 is the progenitor of a mechanical race he built from the ashes of a dead world—Earth. He is a robot of leisure and idle political meddling—a retirement well-earned. Or he was, until a human girl named Eve was dropped in his lap.Geneticists have restored Earth’s biome and begun repopulation. But primate cloning is in its infancy; human … in its infancy; human cloning is banned.
Far from a failed genetics experiment, Eve is brilliant, curious, and heartbreakingly naïve about her species’ history. But Eve’s creator wants her back and has a gruesome fate planned for her. There is only one robot qualified to protect her. For the first time in a thousand years, Charlie7 has a human race to protect.
Extinction Reversed is the first book in the Robot Geneticists series. For fans of old-school science fiction where robots are people and any problem can be solved (or created) with enough scientists. If you’ve ever wondered what the world would be like if scientists who’d read I, Robot created a race of robots, or if you ever wondered what might be more dangerous to clone than dinosaurs, this is the series for you.
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Overall Thoughts
I love stories about the future of human consciousness and the singularity, so I may be biased on this review, but I very much enjoyed this book. It’s more so the first of the above, though you could interpret it a bit as a post-singularity as well. This is well written, has interesting characters, and has no one you can label as “bad” even though people do nefarious things, so this pretty much pushes all my buttons. Plus this is the start of a series, and I’m very much interested in where it goes from here. This is definitely a series I would pick up on my own outside a reading competition, so just from that it gets high marks.
Plot
Let’s dig into things (without too many spoilers). Humanity has been dead a thousand years from a vague alien attack, but what matters is that robots have taken over. Though the book uses this label, I’d say they are more androids (artificial human replicas) or cyborgs (human consciousness with bionic parts) because all robots come from mixes of the original twenty-seven humans who were uploaded in a transhuman program before they all died. The book concerns how these robots are bringing the Earth back to live, repopulating plants and animals, but until now, no one has successfully made a fully-operating human. Well, now someone has, and the entire (robot) world will be thrown into chaos once it’s revealed that a “real” human exists again. There are some fun twists as well, which I won’t spoil, on what the real reasons are for bringing humans back, but regardless, there’s a solid, enjoyable story here. There’s nothing profound and it’s perhaps a little predictable, but it’s also a good story.
Setting
There’s mention of robots in space, but all the action takes place on Earth, and we see the various forms of reconstruction and restoration on human locations. Since these robots are derived from specific humans with wants and needs, there is a whole lot of humanity still in them, and they still do and remember a lot of human things despite not being able to enjoy sensory inputs. It’s poignant and sad, and really puts the robot characters into perspective. In fact, a lot of the fun of the book is seeing a post-scarcity society piddling about with projects and wondering what human intellects with literally no restrictions (and fairly good moral motivations) will do.
Character
The main characters really make this story, from Charlie7, a mysterious robot with a lot of buried mysteries, who seems to be one of the oldest of his kind, to Eve14, the new human who’s never experienced the world, to a few others I won’t spoil. It’s very cool to see that a human raised in a lab environment and fed very specific inputs reacts more as an automaton than a robot/android/cyborg with a thousand years’ experience and scraps of human memories—enough to know how the world works. Putting these two together plays around with how we think of ourselves as humans, what the concept of intellect really means, and what use you would put it to if you had infinite time. I’m very interested to see what the next book holds and how a robot society changes once a human is thrown back in the mix.
Score out of 10 (My personal score, not the final contest score)
Temporary score until more books in the contest are read: Really nothing to complain about. Good story, good characters, some great philosophical questions. The plot is maybe predictable, but overall a darn good time. 9/10.
This was a wonderful twist on the traditional Apocolypse book so many authors put out, and people like me love to read. It won’t be giving anything away by telling you that the roles get reversed; instead of humans rebuilding the world there are “robots” all over the world rebuilding the earth; fixing humanities mistakes, bringing earth back to its virgin state (with a few interesting twists), and readying it for man’s much hoped for return.
The robots are an interesting, but limited, mix of personalities culled at the last minute from the last people available before the end of humanity. The characters are fully fledged personalities, quirky, loving, hateful, vengeful, greedy, lonely, and protective.
Intrigued? Check it out.
This is the first of so far 4 books in the Robot Geneticists series. I was hooked from pretty much the first sentence and remain hooked, waiting breathlessly for the next book, and the one after that. Morin is a terrific world builder, but more than that he creates tremendously compelling characters, some robots, some humans, many both, and all Human in the best sense of the word: *complicated!* There are heroes but they are not without faults. There are villains but they are not irredeemable. The inhabitants that People this world are just struggling to bring it back from the brink, even from beyond the brink, and rebuild a culture that was utterly destroyed a millennium past. In the process of making omelets eggs are broken. This is science fantasy and a heckuva world to visit!