When we meet our protagonist, Aaran, he has spent approximately a year surviving on his own in a post-apocalyptic landscape, avoiding the Zombie-like webbers and the homicidal sentinels controlled by the Neuroweb. His life has been reduced to pillaging everything and anything to survive in a world where humanity has been reduced to small pockets of people who had not connected themselves physically to the world wide web.
This gives a whole new twist to the Zombie Apocalypse . The “Zombies” are being controlled by an artificial intelligence whose goal and motivations are never made clear, and woe be to the human who isn’t with the program. When Aaran meets a young girl also trying to survive, the two of them team up to…
Well, that’s just it. The book is really about surviving an impossible situation. So what we get is a series of near misses and a whole lot of wandering from place to place looking for food and supplies. I kept expecting there to be more to the story, like some sort of resistance cell or maybe a plan to overthrow the robotic overlords. But that never came.
What I got was an interesting character study of a young man who is just barely getting by, who lives just on this side of sanity and who ultimately seems doomed to either be destroyed by the unfeeling sentinels or slip into madness and destroy himself. That, and a whole lot of going through people’s belongings looking for useful things.
And while I was enjoying that story, I really wanted a sense of hope that, if things could not go back to what they once were, at least humanity could at least return to the dominant life on the planet. It’s not clear if there is a sequel forthcoming but I really felt that this book ended just as the real story was getting started.
The story is interesting and Wherlen’s narration is spot on (I’ve come to expect good things from him), but ultimately, I was left wanting more.
I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.