By Tony Ballantyne
Judging from the cover art (which is great by the way) and the back cover blurb this novel looks like a run-of-the-mill battle saga about two tribes of warring robots; nothing special and a strange departure for Tony Ballantyne given that his previous outings have been smart stories about the dangers of AI. But start reading and you’ll soon realise that Mr Ballantyne hasn’t forsaken the intelligent and insightful approach of his previous work, and Twisted Metal easily matches up to his previous best.
On the distant planet of Penrose the soldiers of Artemis, the great machine city, driven by the enigmatic general Kavan, wage war across the continent of Shull, levelling cities and absorbing everything in their path, stripping away metal to feed the war machine and destroying lives and cultures by turning them to the service of Artemis. Next stop for this warrior hoard is great Turing City, the antithesis of Artemis in every way, where robots come from miles around, to make better lives for themselves, express themselves as individuals and contribute to the culture of arts, education and engineering greatness on which the city thrives.
In Turing City, with his wife and son, lives Karel. Karel’s past is shrouded in mystery and he is often regarded as the robot who ‘thinks differently’ and ‘behaves strangely’. Karel wants to put the army on full alert and defend Turing City from the forthcoming attack but cowardly and corrupt politicians persuade the Turing City people to welcome Artemis with open arms so that they may live in peace as they have always done. Artemis, however has other plans and the attack, when it comes, is both swift and brutal. As the remnants of Turing City’s people are conscripted into the service of Artemis, forging their way into the frozen north to take the primitive robots that live in those wastes and find the legendary ‘Book Of Robots’, Karel, who’s destiny seems closely tied to General Kavan, must survive the coming battle, come to terms with his past and find a way to stop the Artemisian onslaught.
I don’t want to mislead anyone, this is a book about robots at war, and it is violent, bloody (well, ‘fluidy’ anyway) and packed with action that is visceral and, at times, shocking. The fight scenes are imaginative, taking good account of the fact that the protagonists are robots and, obviously, different to you and me, and the world it takes place in is beautifully rendered, with each of the robot people separate and distinct from each other.
But it is also much more than that. These robots are sentient, they think and feel and laugh and grieve and they want the same for the offspring they create as any parent – which makes it all the more surprising that you feel emotionally connected with them as you read. Like all books centred around war, it touches on themes of race and identity, of morals and ethics and the political points-scoring that blindly leads armies to fight for a cause which has long since been forgotten but cannot be easily stopped. For Spoole, the leader of the Artemis City, it is politically expedient to keep Kavan, his greatest rival, at arms length while he takes credit for the successes of the Artemisian forces.
Twisted Metal is a more than just a good book, multi-layered and with more depth than it would at first seem to offer and makes for an interesting first step in what must surely be a series to come. It has it’s faults, sure, but none that distract from the fact that Tony Ballantyne is a smart cookie and knows how to tell a story.
Twisted Metal is published by Tor through Pan Macmillan and is available from Play.Com, Blackwell and all good book stores.
Tony Ballantyne has a website that you can reach by clicking here.