THE ROBOTS OF GOTHAM

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

Todd McAulty burst on the scene in the early 2000s with several well-received stories in Blackgate when it was a print magazine. When Blackgate ceased publication, McAulty's voice seemed silenced. It turns out, he was hard at work taking what would have been a novella in the next issue of Blackgate and expanding it to a massive tale of a war-torn Chicago caught in a struggle between various national forces, both human and robot, in The Robots of Gotham.

McAulty has created a world in which humans and machine intelligences live together, not always in harmony. Modern countries have been divided, with many of them being run by machines. One of the remaining battlegrounds is Chicago, which has recently been placed under a Venezuelan occupation force made up of a combination of humans and machines.

The novel opens with a massive attack on a hotel near Chicago's lakefront in which Barry Simcoe, a Canadian in Chicago on business, witnesses the death of a member of the occupying forces and befriends a machine intelligence, rescuing the latter's life. This opening scene sets the tone for much of the novel and Simcoe's character. He seems to be carried along by the activity around him, taking on just enough responsibility and ambition not to be completely responsive. At the same time, he has the ability to form relationships with people.

These relationships are the driving force of the novel. There is something about Simcoe that allows him to connect with people and bind them to him, whether it is the machine intelligence Black Weather, whose life he saved, the hacker/physician Sergei Vulka, who works in the Venezuelan command center at the hotel where Simcoe is staying, of van de Velde, the Venezualan sergeant who initially believed Simcoe caused the death of one of her men during the novel's initial attack. As Simcoe stumbles through war-torn Chicago, various individuals try to help him succeed, in spite of their own orders or other loyalties.

Simcoe's activities seem somewhat random as he moves through the seemingly deserted city, however there are signs that he is beginning to discover a massive conspiracy, or conspiracies, some of which may to connected to each other. McAulty drops mysteries into his story like a device that makes Simcoe invisible to robots, a supersuit developed by the Americans, a potentially lethal manmade plague, and various shadowy organizations. These conspiracies help cement his ties to several of the other characters to Simcoe.

While McAulty's characters are well defined and likable, particularly Sergei and Simcoe, his background seems more obscure, although some of that may be intentional to help build up the conspiracy feeling of the novel. It isn't entirely clear how the specific political splits came about, despite a "Sovereignty Matrix" at the beginning of the book and various data dumps throughout. Similarly, his Chicago seems to be completely deserted with the exception of Simcoe's hotel and the various military installations until Simcoe suddenly needs to rally Chicago's movers and shakers and citizens begin to appear.

McAulty is currently working on a follow-up to The Robots of Gotham, which is good because the current novel, while it ties up many of the threads McAulty introduced also leaves many of the threads loose, as well as introducing new threads relatively late in the novel, putting Simcoe in a position of using his vast connections to try to help one of his acquaintances, Mackenzie Stronnick as well as mysteries which Simcoe is only beginning to understand.

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