Read Recently -- November -- Twisted!
Twisted Metal by Tony Ballantyne
Surprisingly, not a tie-in to the oddly popular evil-clown* combat-racing videogame series by the same title. Instead, it's a work of soft SF, positing a world inhabited by sentient robots. These are humanoid robots, too, and they reproduce and die and have a mythology about how they came to be in the world.
Essentially, the plotline is simple: the fascistic Artemis City sets out to conquer the continent of Shull, taking down all the other robot cities, killing their citizens or converting them to use by Artemis, and demonstrating the success of the Artemisian mindset. Four unique robots play major roles on all sides.
Now, here's the part that's iffy. I mentioned that the robots reproduce. Essentially, when two robots love each other very much they build a body together for their offspring (usually small so that the child will get to learn by building new parts for itself; every family home has a central hearth). The the man extrudes wire (from where we are never told, but as the woman is usually kneeling in front of the man I can make a guess) and the woman takes the wire and twists it into the shape of a "mind". Indeed, one of the central questions of the series is, "Is the mind more than just twisted metal?"
I'm sure you can see a possible problem. I mean, you'd figure that a story about robots would not deal with the issue of rape. You'd be wrong. Granted, robot rape is less traumatic than human rape, since it only involves twisting some wire, but since that can involve overriding the woman's choice of how to twist the mind, it can in fact be very traumatic. And, of course, there's a lot of it in this story. Also, the book is obviously set up as the first part of a series, and does not so much end as stop, and I know many people find that annoying.
So: well-written, original concept, but rapey rapey rapey. Not recommended.
* Yeah, I know that's redundant. The concept "clown" automatically includes the concept "evil". But it's rarely as explicit at this.
Surprisingly, not a tie-in to the oddly popular evil-clown* combat-racing videogame series by the same title. Instead, it's a work of soft SF, positing a world inhabited by sentient robots. These are humanoid robots, too, and they reproduce and die and have a mythology about how they came to be in the world.
Essentially, the plotline is simple: the fascistic Artemis City sets out to conquer the continent of Shull, taking down all the other robot cities, killing their citizens or converting them to use by Artemis, and demonstrating the success of the Artemisian mindset. Four unique robots play major roles on all sides.
Now, here's the part that's iffy. I mentioned that the robots reproduce. Essentially, when two robots love each other very much they build a body together for their offspring (usually small so that the child will get to learn by building new parts for itself; every family home has a central hearth). The the man extrudes wire (from where we are never told, but as the woman is usually kneeling in front of the man I can make a guess) and the woman takes the wire and twists it into the shape of a "mind". Indeed, one of the central questions of the series is, "Is the mind more than just twisted metal?"
I'm sure you can see a possible problem. I mean, you'd figure that a story about robots would not deal with the issue of rape. You'd be wrong. Granted, robot rape is less traumatic than human rape, since it only involves twisting some wire, but since that can involve overriding the woman's choice of how to twist the mind, it can in fact be very traumatic. And, of course, there's a lot of it in this story. Also, the book is obviously set up as the first part of a series, and does not so much end as stop, and I know many people find that annoying.
So: well-written, original concept, but rapey rapey rapey. Not recommended.
* Yeah, I know that's redundant. The concept "clown" automatically includes the concept "evil". But it's rarely as explicit at this.