Teaser

Penrose is a world of robots. It is also a world at war. As armies cross continents and cities are put to the sword, a desperate few seek to survive the end of all they knew. No matter the cost . . .

Review

I don’t buy books based on the cover alone. I always read the back cover to see if it’s something I’ll be interested in. Artwork, as you may well be aware, does not always match the contents of the book. However, Twisted Metal boasts some rather impressive Jon Sullivan art on the cover. If you don’t know the name Sullivan, you might still be familiar with his work. His slick and spiky style has adorned countless Warhammer novels, Shadows of the Apt by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and also provided the distinctive look of Neal Asher’s Polity novels. It’s a style that oozes menace, as as soon as I see it, I start thinking grimdark thoughts. Twisted Metals cover drew me in, and the promise of a book populated by robots had me hooked.

On the inside, this book is absolutely bizarre. Yes, it’s about robots. every character in the book is a robot. But do they feel robotic? Not so much. These are robots free of any Asimovian laws (though I suspect the character of Karel is named in honour of the author of Rossum’s Universal Robots, Karel Capek), which is not a bad thing. They have their own origins, shrouded in mystery and myth. One origin story has robots emerging from dep underground. The result of all this is that the robots don’t feel very artificial. If they were aliens made of flesh and blood, much of the book would read the same. Ballantyne’s idea of robots reproducing to twisting metal into shape is an original one, and offers an explanation for the sexual dimorphism on display. If anything, Ballantyne’s robots are less the heir to current technology and more a return to an older idea: the Golem.

I think that might be my stumbling block with Twisted Metal. I came in expecting science fiction. What I read could just as easily have been fantasy. What constitutes science fiction is notoriously difficult to pin down, and the simple fact of robots is enough for Twisted Metal to pass my personal threshold, but it remained a tricky book to get into. For the most part, the robots act as f they are human, adding to the sense of disconnection when their mechanical nature surfaces in some piece of description.

With a Jon Sullivan cover and a recommendation from Neal Asher, one thing that did not come as a surprise is that Twisted Metal has a certain grimdark feel to it. Robots are killed, mutilated, and otherwise ripped apart with gleeful abandon. In one particularly harrowing scene, a humanoid robot is turned into a sentient train. Crowds of refugees are encouraged to dismember one another. Literal war machines consume everything in their path, sentient or otherwise. The level of nihilism on display is on a par with Asher’s Owner trilogy, with nary a pinprick of light in all the darkness. As someone who burned out on grimdark fantasy a long time ago, it was hard to enjoy Twisted Metal as intended.

If you like grimdark, however, then by all means you should give this book the time of day. Ballantyne’s prose is as fluid as his machinery, and there are some very good illustrations dividing the book’s dozen acts. It’s also fascinating to read science fiction with no human characters. They say that all stories are about people, after all. With endless worlds to explore, why should all of those people be flesh and blood?

Book Stats

• Penrose #1
• First Published 2009
• 480 Pages