Cyborg by William F. Wu
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This third book of the Robot City series wasn’t nearly as good as the first two. In fact, I was pretty disappointed with it. The writer just didn’t seem to have it together. Maybe he’s a new author. I don’t know. The language was stilted and forced. Transitions were left out. It was just bad.
In this book, Derec and Katherine are still trying to locate the lost key so they can leave the planet and get to another planet somewhere. However, the robots of Robot City have hidden it in a well guarded location and it’s virtually impossible to get to.
Speaking of Katherine, Derec learns her real name is Ariel and she’s a rich daughter of a famous woman from the planet of Aurora. She apparently has an unnamed terminal disease that, although not contagious, has gotten her banned from her home planet and she has been searching the galaxy for a cure. Since Derec, who is very angry in this book for some unknown reason, and Ariel fight a lot, this new knowledge softens his stance some and he feels sorry for her and starts to take it easy on her.
One day, when going through the city’s computer, they discover there are three other humans in Robot City. They get excited, thinking these people might have a ship that could get them off world, so they are determined to find them. Meanwhile, a teenager heading to college crash lands in Robot City and nearly dies. The robot medical team doesn’t know enough about human physiology to repair his human body, so they create a new robot body and transplant his brain into it, making him a cyborg. Weird how they can do that, but they can’t fix his human body, huh? Naturally, he’s freaked out, so against their advice, he takes off into the city alone and wanders around. He talks out loud to himself, which is really annoying to read, and he determines that he is the strongest individual on the planet, since he has a robot body, but is still a human and robots have to apply the Three Laws to him. He decides to take over the planet and rule it. Why? No idea. He decides to enlist the two other humans he has found, Derec and Ariel, to help him, so he goes to see them. And gets in a fight with them. Literally. A physical altercation. It’s bizarre. He’s a very tempestuous individual. He later asks Ariel to have her brain transplanted into a robot body and join him in ruling the world and she actually considers it, thinking this could save her from her disease. How incredibly stupid is that? Jeff, the cyborg, is crazy, so Derec and Ariel give the robots instructions to find him and bring him to them. He is eventually caught and is put under the knife by the medical staff. They ask Derec to get naked and let them scan him. Now they know about male human physiology. Yeah. So, they transplant Jeff’s brain back into his old body and fix him up. All it took for them to do that was to scan Derec’s naked body. Okay. Whatever. Bad book, as I said. Meanwhile, two of Derec and Ariel’s old friends from the first book show up in a one person lander. They decide to send Jeff off to college in it and they would stay in Robot City and continue to search for cures for Ariel’s unnamed disease.
It looked to me like the target audience for this book was middle school males. At least it was short, a one day read. And I still like the series and will continue to read on. If you’re reading the series, you’ll want to read this just to know what is happening. However, it’s not much of a stand alone novel, so I’d suggest with starting with the first book and going from there. If you’re reading the series, I cautiously recommend it. If not, I don’t.
hankrules2011 