Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Genre Character of the Week: Cormac Wallace

Last Friday I had the pleasure of reading Daniel H. Wilson's Robopocalypse. This book, which took me a day to read is bascially as disaster-movie-style novel set in a near future (our cars drvie us around and most people have robot butlers) where all of the robots in the world get switched to evil and attempt to destroy mankind.


The novel is being made into a movie in 2013 and although the novel does, at times, read like a film treatment, it was an incredible read, full of excitement, robots and a lot of horror. As my pet sub-genre is post-apocalyptic fiction, I've got to say this works incredibly well for me, it features a large cast of engrossing characters, and specirfically this week's genre character, Cormac "Bright Boy" Wallace.



The book follows eight characters through the build-up, the event, the aftermath and the eventual rebellion against the machines. Cormac begins his journey in Boston, and ends up swept up in one of the most frightening wars imaginable, because unlike an alien or zombie-based apocalypse, Robopocalypse feels much more like a nuclear one, an end of our own devising.



What I like best about Cormac is that he is definitely the stories every-man; he's not a soldier, computer genius or politician, he's just a kid swept up into something really terrible. Through it all however, he always does his best, and like most of my favourite characters, he learns.

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