Steel Guardian by Cameron Coral

I really enjoyed reading Steel Guardian by Cameron Coral. I think I got it on some sort of sale, based on reading the premise of “janitor robot must protect human baby while wandering though the wasteland of the AI Uprising Apocalypse”.

Premise

That quick statement is basically the entire premise and plot of the book. Block is a service bot who once served as the janitor for a hotel in Chicago. The uprising of the soldier bots left them without their human guests to serve and so they are wandering in search of a new hotel to clean. A chance encounter while searching for a power source leaves block in charge of a human infant and searching for a worthy person to give the baby to. Along the way, Block encounters other robots and people on the journey who help Block figure out out to actually care for the child. This includes Nova, a human captured by robots and searching for her way to escape.

What I Liked

I really liked the characterization of Block. Block is a flawed character with a very specific view of the world and that view flavors every interaction they have with others throughout the entire book.

The world building is also done very well, painting a dystopian war setting where things are still very touchy between the human side and the machine side which gives a good background to Block needing to lay low to get the child to someone before either human soldiers or the robot soldiers can find them and harm either.

What I Didn’t Care For

There were two scenes I didn’t care for in the book. One is the scene in the robot market where Nova first enters the scene. She’s been captured as an enemy combatant and is placed on sale to the other robots, which that whole slave market scene and the implications and discussions of what robots might do with their own human were a little much, but I suppose had their part in why the child must be kept away from the bots.

The other is the final climactic scene which just ends. There’s no real resolution or denouement, just an end. There are more books to the series, maybe this really was the cleanest place to break the series, but it just felt sudden and jarring to me. And it’s not really a cliffhanger; this story’s main conflict is resolved in the scene just before. It’s just a sudden end.

Overall

Like I said, overall I really liked this one and did purchase the other books in the series and plan to read them all. The banter between Nova and Block, the relationships between Nova and Block and the child, the other characters who enter and exit the story, the lingering mystery of how the kid came to be in the incubator bot in the firefight in the first place. It was all really fun to read and I enjoyed it a lot.