---
product_id: 66528116
title: "Sea of Rust: A Novel"
brand: "c. robert cargill"
price: "€ 39.42"
currency: EUR
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 7
url: https://www.desertcart.es/products/66528116-sea-of-rust-a-novel
store_origin: ES
region: Spain
---

# Sea of Rust: A Novel

**Brand:** c. robert cargill
**Price:** € 39.42
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

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- **What is this?** Sea of Rust: A Novel by c. robert cargill
- **How much does it cost?** € 39.42 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Fantastic Western-style Novel With Robots
  

*by A***Y on Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2017*

Short Review : A surprisingly poignant and intelligent hash of post-apocalyptic, Western, and robo-sci-fi elements that explores ethics, philosophy, civilization, and the meaning of life.  A unique spin on several oftentimes overworked genres!Longer Review : This book really caught me by surprise.  I found this through a Twitter re-tweet; upon checking out the author, I was shocked he only had 3 books, this one being the third, and the other 2 were fantasy novels with mixed reviews.  So I downloaded a sample and fully expected to not buy the full book.However, the story being told her is a wonderful and swirling mix of thematic and genre elements.  Much like "Red Rising", this is a book that brings together a whole slew of ideas and styles that, on a drafting board, sound ridiculous and shouldn't work ... and yet they do to fantastic effect.  The synopsis for this novel actually downplays what this book is like, and makes it sound like a tongue-in-cheek dark comedy about robots bumbling around in a spaghetti Western.  The truth is that this novel is much more developed and nuanced than that.  Basically, this takes place 30 years after the start of the war to kill all humans (a la Skynet in the Terminator franchise but much more interesting), and something like 10 years after the death of the last human.  Earth is now populated by a mix of OWIs (One World Intelligences, AKA, Skynet-style hive-minds) and "freeboots", or basically AIs inhabiting a single, self-contained humanoid robot.  In the style of a Western, the OWIs basically represent "The Man" or "The Feds" from the East, and the freebots represent the ranchers and farmers that just want to be left alone on the frontier.  And similar to how many cowboys and gunslingers were Civil War veterans, all freeboots were veterans in the war against humans.This is where the book really made itself a 5 star novel in my opinion.  Just about every other robots-kill-all-humans sci-fi has the humans as the beleaguered good guys and the robots as the merciless, soulless bad guys.  And while that's not necessarily NOT the case here, the author does a fantastic job of slowly selling the reader on the idea of these freebots being more than just "anti-human".  This is not a novel that involves robots doing a victory lap, post-war.  This is, in large part, a story of robots attempting to figure out the "Now What?" that comes after winning a war that was everything and destroyed everything.  In this, the author excels at making you forget you're reading a story where literally every character is a machine, a non-human entity.  There's explorations of post-traumatic stress, of regret, of the meaning of life beyond war and conflict, of art and philosophy, of the cost of winning, of the cost of living, of defining yourself.  There's sequences where a character describes using a flamethrower and killing people, of killing children, and yet even after this revelation, the author has created an environment in which you almost feel worse for the robot than for the children ... almost.  There's numerous flashbacks to before the war and discussions of who many of the robots were before they were scavengers and mercenaries and pathfinders and murderers; there's one particular chapter for the protagonist that sent a few shivers up my spine and really struck home, as it basically becomes a "Sophie's Choice" type of thing.And that kind of sums up a large part of what this novel is about: robots making increasingly desperate and hopeless decisions in a world that is falling apart under them.  Again, I want to emphasize here that, despite the fact that most of this is a direct result of the robots' decision to start a war and end humans, you still feel sympathy for them because (other than the OWIs) they are not singular, monolithic and personality-free intelligences.  These are actual characters, each with their own struggles, each trying to find meaning in a meaningless world.This brings me to the excellent opening, middle and ending chapters that succinctly embody the spirit of the novel (I'll leave off details of the final chapter because, obviously, it's somewhat spoilerish, and I'll keep the middle chapter vague for that plus it's best to read it with few preconceptions).  The novel opens with our protagonist watching a sunset and discussing the green flash that sometimes happens right before the sun goes all the way below the horizon (this is a real thing, BTW).  They discuss it as being a sign of the magic in the world, but brush it off as there being no magic left.  And that perfectly sets the tone for the novel.  As things progress, and characters comes and go, and flashbacks provide the occasional interlude, the reader is constantly reminded, with subtle intelligence, that things are the way they are because there is no magic left in the world.  And that's not meant to be a simple proclamation that's thrown aside to explore other ideas; instead, each event, each flashback, each discussion between characters, is essentially an exploration of HOW and WHY the magic has left the world.  The author excelled at this, and damn near perfectly captured this concept from every angle.  We eventually find out through a mid-novel interlude where this idea of the magic in the green flash at sunset came from, and then, to tie everything together, the novel ends with a sunset and a green flash in a way that, well, was perfect and damn near made me spill a tear.SUMMARY: This is a great book.  Even for people that don't read hardcore sci-fi, or shy away from the kind of sci-fi with robots and lasers and plasma and spaceships, this is an easy but intelligent and emotional novel.  Don't think of this as a SCI-FI! but think of it as a Western ... with robots ... and no humans ... and figuring out the meaning of life at the edge of the world and the end of civilization.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Can Humanity Live On after the End of the Human Kind?
  

*by P***V on Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2018*

Thirty years after wiping out all of mankind, robots have met their own match and become prey to an even stronger foe, the AI mainframes. Brittle, a rare Caregiver model, ekes out a living harvesting robots for spare parts in the desolate post-apocalyptic American Rust Belt. But little does she know: fate is waiting for her with a vengeance. She is soon to meet her own arch-nemesis, a fellow robot who desperately needs a spare Caregiver part to survive. After the ensuing fight, Brittle will discover both a terrible secret about herself and a tremendous hope for the future of all robots.Sea of Rust is a book that I picked up almost reluctantly and after a lot of hesitation as I expected that it would either abuse the clichéd tropes of the ‘good humans’ versus the ‘bad robots’ or that it would be a soulless and completely unrelatable robotic romp. Or that even worse—it would be both. To my immense delight, it was neither. Despite the genocide perpetrated by them, the robots in Sea of Rust are no heinous, cold-blooded killing machines. They are feeling, sensing, thinking beings that are packed with post-traumatic stress, guilt and regret about the killing and are ever confronted with the heartrending dilemma, ‘is survival worth if it comes at all costs’?The subtle, nuanced characterisation of Brittle, her arch-foe Mercer and all the supporting characters as flawed, yet immensely complex and sympathetic beings that keep questioning their actions soon makes you forget that these are machines and not people. Until you realise that the only way for humanity to live on—if at all—is through them, until you finally start rooting for them in their own uphill battle for survival.This is what turns what would otherwise be an unrelatable or even depressing story into an uplifting and immensely engaging read. The novel has a solid and logical plot. There are some rather entertaining battle scenes (even if the final one practically screams Mad Max and Furiosa). There is fluid alternation between past and present that successfully fuses into a cohesive narrative, and even if most of the exposition is in the form of infodumps, this does not have a jarring effect on the reader.But the strongest suit of the novel is, yet again, its characterisation. As strange as it sounds, for a book that does not feature a single human, Sea of Rust has better characterisation and more engaging and well fleshed-out characters than most novels in the genre that were published last year, even awarded ones. A rather unanticipated and strangely exhilarating masterpiece that comes from a completely unexpected direction.

### ⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Some clever ideas but the science is TERRIBLE!
  

*by A***R on Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 25, 2018*

Be warned - spoilers ahead. But do yourself a favour and read them - it may put you off buying the book. I bought this in the sure knowledge that I was in for a cracking tale. After all, how could so many fine reviews get it wrong? Well they did. The big build-up made this the most disappointing book I have ever read, and quite how it was *One of Financial Times' Best Books of 2017* is utterly bewildering.The story is entertaining enough but has a recurring issue that appears on every other page. The science is terrible, almost childish, and seems to have been written by someone with very little interest in science be it real or imagined.The story is set many decades in the future, 30-odd years after AI's have exterminated not only humans but animals too. So all the characters are robots, but rather than being the product of amazing advances in high tech exotic materials and quantum computers, they could almost be things that we will build in just a few years from now. There are so many tech issues I couldn't possibly list them all, but for instance...The robots are mostly humanoid in form, with two arms, two legs and two eyes that can only see forward. They have to turn their heads to look behind. Why not just install another eye?  They actually talk to each other, using spoken English. Really? Good grief - my 10 year old laptop can download and display a complete Encyclopaedia Britannica in about 20 seconds. Machines NOW communicate billions of times faster than speech. In 100 years time? Well who knows, but they won't be speaking English to each other.These amazing AI's still use and run out of RAM. Their CPU's overheat. They work with plain old servos and are powered with plain old batteries. A robot with a flat battery cannot recharge from a vehicle. They still use wifi. What buildings remain are lit by fluorescent tubes. This list could go on and on...Like a cheesy movie, the 'good' guys who are half a century old can somehow, Rambo style, shoot and kill, with pistols and rifles and bullets, dozens of state of the art military grade robots designed and built by the megamind AI. The swarming bad guy robots get all confused when their communication links are compromised. COME ON!!! It is ridiculous.Like I said, the science is terrible. Really, really terrible. Avoid unless you're 10 years old.

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*Product available on Desertcart Spain*
*Store origin: ES*
*Last updated: 2026-02-22*