I gave up after a few chapters of being bored by blue-collar fishermen robots talking about inane shit. Nothing about it felt like they were robots, other than the prose reminded me of it by talking about the gears.

Initially, I was inclined to put this one down and forget it, but there is something strange in Ballantyne's novel, a kind of twistedness that held me as he gradually hints at and then unveils surprising (but consistent) plot developments. Clearly, this is the first of a series, and it's pretty good. ( )

This was an interesting book which was not at all what I was expecting it to be. The publishers seem to have marketed it as a rip-roaring action adventure with warring robots. Well the war is there and so are the robots, but so are a great deal of ruminations on determinism vs. free will, totalitarianism vs. individualism, the meaning of life, evolution, and parenthood.

The setting is Penrose, a world inhabited by robots. Counter-intuitively, the technological level of the robots is somewhere around Earth's in WW1 - with railways the primary means of transport. On the continent of Shull, a totalitarian state is gradually taking over the continent, state by state, stripping each state of of its precious resources (metal) and using them in fueling their war machine. The last surviving city-state is Turing City, where the people are confronted with the choice of building the minds of the next generation of children either in the traditional individualistic manner of the city or in a manner closer to the totalitarian philosophy of Nyro who put the state above all else and declared that all robots and their minds are just metal to be used in the service of the state.

The robot societies are vivid and imaginatively described. At times, the author inserts myths and allegorical tales which form the common basis of the robotic cultures of Shull, which gives the book a far less technophillic tone than one would expect of such a setting and is at times almost fantastic or mythical in tone. The story unfolds from shifting point of views of different male and female characters from the various city-states who are caught up in the war. In their depictions Tony Ballantyne succeeds in making them both alien and oddly human at the same time. I won't get too much into the story here, but it certainly gripped my attention throughout, mostly because I wanted to know what happened to the characters next. The ending was a little unsatisfying, but is obviously setting things up for the next in the series (a planned trilogy I believe).

Overall, an entertaining and engaging read which is very different in feel and tone to most other contemporary SF. ( )