Daniel H. Wilson published Robopocalypse in 2011. Despite almost immediately being snapped up by Hollywood and going into pre-production mode, a decade later no film adaptation was even close to come to a theater near anybody and the delay could not be blamed on Covid-19. The path to a film version of the novel has been a decidedly tortuous one that has taken it from being a pet project of Steven Spielberg to being adopted as a sick puppy by director Michael Bay. That trip along the Yellow Brick Road in reverse from the Wizard to Munchkinland may be a cause for sadness, but it could hardly be more appropriate. For when all is said and done, Wilson’s novel is really far closer to being a literary version of every Michael Bay movie than any Steven Spielberg film.
The structure and form that Wilson adopts for his tale of a robot apocalypse perhaps seems to give the story more gravity and greater weight as a serious science fiction that the novel actual merits. The conceit of the book is that a survivor of the war between humans and robots has stumbled across the equivalent of an airplane’s “black box” after a devastating crash. (Actually there are usually two different boxes neither of which are black, each containing different but equally valuable data that should be able to “tell the story” of exactly what happened to make a plane crash even if there are no survivors to provide eyewitness accounts.) In this case, what is found is quite literally a black cube which was created by the robots as an archive of the human heroes of the story. It is an interesting approach, to be sure, but hardly necessary.
More to the point, there is a significant chasm between the inventiveness and imagination of the novel’s structure and the somewhat predictable and pedestrian narrative that structure relates. While the novel has its fair share of champions extolling the “science” of artificial intelligence and how the story projects a version of the paranoid nightmare of the inevitable robot uprising against humans, the believability quotient ultimately transforms into something that seems completely beside the point.
Take away the so-called scientific plausibility (and leave that to others with far more ability to confirm) and remove the inventive structure holding the story together and the whole thing collapses into an entertaining heap of plots and incidents already widely available for anyone with access to shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits and the stories of writers like Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov. The author even borrows the title of one of Bradbury’s short stories—“Zero Hour”—that shares similar thematic DNA with his own plot as the term for the moment in which the war is instigated. For that matter, there does not seem to be terribly much distance between the war between humans and robots conducted here and that between the Simpsons and robots in the episode where all hell breaks loose at Itchy and Scratchy Land. And while on the subject, even the structural foundation of the storytelling will seem less than inventive to readers familiar with World War Z.
Ultimately, Robopocalypse stands or falls on the strength of its storytelling conceit because what it amounts to is a series of individual narratives featuring an assortment of various characters. It is like a film that moves quickly from one big set piece to the next with little concern for the connective tissue linking them. Or, put another way, it is like weird case of synesthesia in which you can “read” a Michael Bay film that was never actually made.
