Sea of Rust (Sea of Rust #1), by C. Robert Cargill

  Jesus Christ, this book has 100000 chapters! And that's because there are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.

  Anyway, Sea of Rust starts off as yet another western with robots, set in a post apocalyptic desert, where machines with guns act and feel like people in a lawless land. But as the book progressed, it became more of an exploration of what means to be alive, what meaning we derive from life and what means to actually live as opposed to just survive. It wasn't a literary or philosophical masterpiece or anything, but it did carry a nice punch to the gut in some scenes. The book became better as it got close to the end, to the point that I could have considered reading the next book in the story, if there was one.

  In fact, there is another book in the series, but it's a prequel. Film writer types, right?

  There are about three major twists, one that you kind of guess from the beginning, one that I should have seen, but never thought about and another that is more or less a hope to get into another genre later on. There are also some major plot holes, but just a few and they underpin the story, so you just have to ignore those if you want to enjoy the book.

  Robert C. Cargill is a film writer as well as books, he did the Sinister films and Doctor Strange and The Black Phone, the last two having seen and enjoyed. His writing is good, although you feel the cinematic nature of it. Writing from the perspective of robots did help with limiting things to just sound and visuals anyway.

  I liked the book, although I didn't feel it spent enough time creating the world or its characters. A world of machines should have been orders of magnitude more diverse and interesting than what's in this. It's one of those stories that need to be told in a certain way, and the world around is just a prop for it. It feels linear and without breadth. If I were to compare it with anything, it would be the Fallout TV series, but seen only from the perspective of the ghoul.