I have read a lot of Isaac Hooke books. They have all been really good and this one is no exception! It’s a new series with just the title of the book the same as the series title, I guess. “World War R” is about the destruction of civilization by robots or an artificial intelligence that thought humans were too much trouble to have around. It, fortunately, is far, far in our distant future.
The story centers around a small special forces team comprised of Army Rangers and Air Force Special Tactics troops. They were just finishing up a mission in Africa and had called in their pickup bird for retrieval. Once on-board, they were supposed to heading back to base. Only the auto-piloted aircraft had different ideas. It was heading straight for an active volcano!
Staff Sgt Logan Asher was the leader of this band of warriors. He’d been at his job for quite awhile and was very good at it along with several other members of the Shadowwalkers. That’s what they called themselves and every member of the team seemed to have some kind of nickname. I won’t go through them all, just say you’ll read about ten of Asher’s people which included two women warriors. They constantly banter about which can be distracting, but it stops when SSgt Asher has something to say. I do believe that the banter in this squad is a lot less disgusting that what Mr. Hooke has written in several other of his books. If you’re against bad language, you’re not going to have good read, but in my opinion, it’s not as bad as it could have been considering this authors track record.
Ok, so the team has to escape an auto-piloted aircraft some where in Africa and then figure out what went wrong. In this future, everything is pretty much automated through the GAIN network. Robots are being used by the military as normal every day tools. They have mobile automate machine gun robots, pack carrying robots, small aerial observer drones and even tough flying platforms. While not with the Shadowwalkers, there’s even tracked robots sporting all sorts of missiles and weapons all at the command of the guy in charge through GAIN. And apparently someone or some thing has hacked GAIN, which was supposed to be impossible.
While SSgt Asher and his team of Shadowwalkers were off the grid in Africa on mission, the rest of the world was being destroyed! The Shadowwalkers tried to make it back to their base only to find it swarming with vicious robots armed to the teeth and under control of someone other than them. While they did manage to find an older model aircraft, they eventually decided to head back to the states and Ft. Benning. There only problem now was how to not get shot down by “friendly” anti-aircraft assets guarding the borders. It didn’t sound like there were any humans alive controlling anything so what made these robots turn on humanity? Better yet, how do this small team get control of the situation and prevent their death, which would be a very good thing!
This is a good story although for this one special operations unit to be the only one surviving is kind of farfetched. You won’t read about the team finding any other military groups when they do make it back to the United States. But, that’s the way the book reads so I’ll go along with it for now. Besides, this is the first book of a three book trilogy so there may be more coming in the next two books which I do plan to read, and soon!