Hello and welcome to Track of Words, where I hope you’ll join me in welcoming legendary author Graham McNeill to the site for this guest review of apocalyptic adventure novel Day Zero by C. Robert Cargill. I imagine Graham will be very familiar to most readers, as the author of countless hugely popular books for Black Library from Nightbringer to Swords of Calth, not to mention Arkham Horror and Stargate novels and all manner of fantastic fiction for League of Legends. I couldn’t be happier to hand the reins of the site over to Graham for this guest review – I haven’t read Day Zero myself, but both this and Cargill’s 2017 novel Sea of Rust have been on my radar for a while now, and based on Graham’s review I definitely think I need to read this book!
Anyway, without further ado let’s hand things over to Graham…
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“Welcome to the Mama Bears…”
Imagine if, instead of being a cuddly toy, only ever active in the imagination of a young Calvin, Hobbes the Tiger was in fact an artificially intelligent robot with a deep love for his young friend and an arsenal of deep-buried combat protocols…
That latter part comes later in C. Robert Cargill’s fantastic novel Day Zero, and it’s a moment well worth waiting for. This is a book that manages the feat of being highly entertaining as well as thought provoking in the nature of humankind’s dependency on technology, the way we perceive them, and (often more importantly) how they see themselves. Movies like I, Robot, AI: Artificial Intelligence, and games like Detroit: Become Human, as well as plenty of others, have taken swings at this theme, though none have done it through the eyes of a robotic killer tiger (much to their detriment).
The novel begins in a near and wholly plausible/recognisable future, with Pounce, an AI tiger robot serving as the nanny of eight-year-old Ezra, finding his original box in the family attic. Understandably, this sets off a series of existential wobbles in his mind, reinforcing that he is a thinking thing and will never be, in his words, ‘a real boy’. He knows this, of course, but it’s something else to be confronted with the reality of it quite so bluntly. It’s a quiet, yet important setup for what’s to come in the novel, placed in an entirely unremarkable suburb of Austintonio – a metroplex of the steadily expanding cities of Austin and San Antonio.
Pounce lives a quiet life, caring for Ezra, picking him up from school, chatting with the other nanny robots, and keeping things in his household on an even keel. The first hint that something isn’t right in this idyll, beyond Pounce finding his box, is when Ezra’s school teaches the kids about Isaac, a freed robot who’s set up his own robot utopia that’s causing relief and alarm in equal measure across the world.
On the night Isaac is set to broadcast his global message to the world, an act of terrorism ignites a cascade of retaliatory violence that culminates in a panicking humanity declaring AI unlawful and that everyone must shut down all their robots. Like, right now. At the same time, a mysterious download arrives in Pounce’s brain that deactivates his inability to harm humans. The entire robot population of Earth receives the same download and as vengeful robots go on killing sprees, the robot tiger is faced with a terrible choice; allow himself to be deactivated forever or to fight back against his owners. But Pounce doesn’t like either option, and makes one of his own.
What follows is part thriller, part road-trip, part exploration on the meaning of free will, and what it means to love someone so completely that you would do anything for them. Pounce loves Ezra, really loves him, but is that love real or just hardwired into his circuits? It’s a question that’ll be asked – by himself and others – many times over the course of the book, and Cargill wisely lets the reader reach their own conclusion, though it’s not hard to see where he himself comes down.
Following Pounce and Ezra through the terror of what’s happening is a thrilling ride, as you’d expect from the writer of Sinister, Doctor Strange, and The Black Phone. As heartbreaking as it is to feel Ezra’s fear at what’s happening, it’s Pounce’s emotional journey over the course of the story that forms the main spine of the novel. Pounce knows what he is and how this will likely end, but he does it anyway; not because that’s what he’s been programmed to do, but because it’s what he wants to do, because he loves Ezra and has made a choice to try and save him, no matter the cost.
Around the halfway point, Pounce taps into abilities he never knew he had, transforming him into more than just a nanny robot, but a full-fledged robo-warrior. It wouldn’t be fair to reveal too much more of the novel’s story, but events gradually ramp up in scale and threat until you can’t believe Pounce and the entertaining characters he and Ezra meet along the way can possibly forge a path through to a happy ending. But then, a story like this in the hands of such a skilled storyteller was never going to have a clean, deus-ex-machina ending, and Cargill strikes a satisfying balance with where he leaves his characters at the end; giving us enough closure to feel that warm satisfaction of a well-told story that reaches a natural end, while still promising that slivers of hope yet remain.
Over the course of the story, we’re forced to question the very nature of what and how we choose to recognise as real, thinking, sentient beings, and as we race headlong towards fully-realised AI, it’s a both a practical and philosophical question we’d be best grappling with sooner rather than later.
Highly recommended.
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Graham McNeill is a Scottish, LA-based, award-winning, NYT best-selling author, screenwriter, and games developer. Living in America for the last six years, he currently works for Riot Games as Principal Narrative Writer in the League of Legends IP.
After working as a games developer in the Warhammer IP at Games Workshop for six years, Graham embarked on a freelance writing career, and, to date, has penned thirty-five novels, around eighty short stories, audio dramas, and comics since his first book, Nightbringer was published in 2002 by The Black Library. Over the years, Graham has written a host of novels for numerous global franchises, including Blizzard Entertainment’s Starcraft universe and the Dark Waters trilogy for Fantasy Flight Games Arkham Horror range, as well as original fiction for numerous other publishers.
Graham’s novels have been translated into numerous languages and are sold in bookstores all around the world. His novel, Empire, won the David Gemmell Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel in 2010, and four of his novels in the Horus Heresy series have gone on to become New York Times best-sellers.
You can find Graham on Twitter.
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Massive thanks to Graham for contributing this brilliant review – I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this as much as I did! I’m sure you’ll agree too that Day Zero sounds fantastic; I’m definitely going to pick it up, and I’m looking forward to hopefully reading it soon.
See also: all of the reviews and interviews featuring Graham McNeill on Track of Words.
Check out the links below to order* a copy of Day Zero and make up your own mind about it!
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