Humans Bow Down
In a world run by machines, humans are an endangered species.
The Great War is over. The Robots have won. The humans who survived have two choices--they can submit and serve the vicious rulers they created or be banished to the Reserve, a desolate, unforgiving landscape where it's a crime to be human. And the robots aren't content--following the orders of their soulless leader, they're planning to conquer humanity's last refuge. With nothing left to lose, Six, a feisty, determined young woman whose family was killed with the first shots of the war, is a rebel with a cause. On the run for her life after an attempted massacre, Six is determined to save humanity before the robots finish what the Great War started and wipe humans off the face of the earth, once and for all.
I am on the fence about this book. On the one hand, for a Patterson book, it is an interesting concept reading about a world where the robots are in charge and humanity is near extinction. The robots in this one were also portrayed differently than in most AI uber bad stories in that they acted almost completely human, even eating and creating ‘waste’, along with having feelings. At the same time, how many more stories do we really need about AI taking over the world and killing humans? Terminator has done it to death.
There’s a LGBT relationship thrown in at the very end with no lead up that either character was headed that way so it felt a bit like it was put in just for show which irritated me because they had a real chance in character development to flush this out but didn’t. One of the best examples of transgendered, that feeling of being one gender but trapped in the wrong body, was given to a freaking robot! I guess that was to show that somehow the AI was that great even robots could ‘feel’ transgendered but to me it just cheapened it, like being transgendered is nothing but bad programming which is basically what some of the other AI jerk off bots claimed as they even had a process for reprogramming. It felt too much like another thrown in there concept just to be able to say they had one.
There were illustrations on practically every page and it felt a bit like a YA adult novel. The pace, phrases used, plot development all reminded me A LOT of his Maximum Ride series; it just has a very similar ‘sound’.
It felt like there was so much missing in how the world was set up. It seemed to be all centered in Colorado but there wasn’t much mention of how the rest of the world fared with this AI take over.
There also weren’t any characters you could really sink your teeth into, no one you felt like was worth your time to invest in. As a human you would of course want humanity to fight back and win so any human doing that you’d want to root on and support but some of the robots came off with better character development, morals, ethics and plot lines than the humans.
The book ended in such a way that it could either be a standalone or a sequel could easily be written to pick up from where this left off because there were a few cliffhanger like elements added to the last few chapters.
This is definitely going to be a divisive book in that you’ll either like it or hate it.