Chapter by Chapter

Revolution 19 by author Gregg Rosenblum was a novel that sounded like it would be the ultimate sci-fi dystopia. Have you seen that cover? Totally creepy, totally left me thinking about all the possible plot points that could take place in the novel and it left me wanting to read the novel more than anything. The description made me think that I was being promised Terminator meets I, Robot and that sounded totally awesome. That being said my expectations for this novel were fairly high.Revolution 19 takes place in the third person and looks at the lives of main characters Nick, Kevin and Cass who were part of a village that existed with only humans. In the year 2071, the artificial intelligence that humans used to defend ourselves in war ended up becoming intelligent enough to understand not only our violence but also how to protect us: By saving the human race from itself and dictating the existence of human life. Humans that resisted the robots’ new way of life were either killed… or worse and those who got away lived in secret villages just like the one that Nick, Kevin and Cass used to live in. When their village is detected by the robots they tried to protect themselves from, the village’s entire population is decimated and leaves the three siblings in the woods pondering the idea that their parents are still alive. A robot-ruled city is discovered and when the fact that the siblings parents are living inside of a rehabilitation center, the group comes up with a dangerous plan: Enter the city ruled by machines and steal their parents back or die trying. The novel starts off with a flashback taking place when Cass, Nick and Kevin’s parents were fleeing from the robots. In that flashback, the novel immediately is given a fast pace and shows how menacing the robots can be. Three important things happen in the flashback 1) Nick and Kevin’s parents manage to flee from the city 2) They bring Cass with them 3) Cass’s parents are shot with the robots “lases” as a sort of payment for the others to escape. Not only was I staring at the next chapter thinking ‘Can anything top this?’ but also wondering what else could possibly happen in the future of the novel’s plot.One thing that I really liked about Revolution 19 was the backstory behind the robot’s coming to power. Since the robots ruling over most of the surviving population was entirely humanity’s fault (too much violence = a bad time) I had a bit of a hard time understanding why the robots would be so angry or even concern themselves with helping us. They could easily just get rid of us all and repopulate the Earth with robots, but instead the novel gets into the ethics of the robots’ way of thinking and how treating humans like animals inside of a zoo was the best possible idea they could come up with. However, don’t go about thinking that the robots are the good guys in this story—stepping out of line means a painful rehabilitation system or execution.I mentioned earlier that I had high expectations for the plot and that the flashback at the start of the novel set up a fast pace. Sadly, the novel didn’t have a consistency with maintaining that fast pace, but what really got to me was the robots characteristics. I liked their brains, but I didn’t like the way that they looked. I’ll admit that in my head I believed that these super-intelligent AI machines that managed to enslave humanity would be similar to a Terminator (cyborgs are cool too) and the robots in Revolution 19 aren’t as cool as those ones… one of the reasons being that they don’t have legs. They have wheels. Think Marvel Comic’s Ultron meets Wall-E.I’d recommend Revolution 19 to readers who are looking for a sci-fi and any fans of dystopia that want to delve into a world ruled by creatures of our own making.