Revolution 19 by Gregg Rosenblum

Published by HarperTeen on January 8, 2013 

So in 2051 there's a robot revolution, with all the military robots turning against the humans who once controlled them. A robot apocalypse ensues, the surviving humans who are not held captive take refuge in the woods, and the story follows from that unoriginal premise. Fourteen years later, Kevin and Nick and Cass, along with their survivalist parents, are living in a Freepost, hiding from the bots. Their Freepost is the nineteenth either mistakenly or deliberately branded as revolutionary (hence the title), leading to a robot attack. The kids escape but their parents and some of their friends are captured.

The plot eventually follows the plucky kids as the sneak into the city to rescue their parents from the killer robots. The city is filled with forgotten technology like elevators and Segways (which is pretty much already a forgotten technology). They meet a plucky city kid named Lexi, who also happens to be pretty, and she decides to help them because Nick, having knocked down a surveillance bot in a David vs. Goliath moment, has become a rock star among city kids. Apart from the need to add a predictable romantic angle to the story, that's presumably why Lexi likes Nick so much (she clearly couldn't be attracted to his mind).

To be fair, Revolution 19 is less a robot apocalypse novel than it is a novel about the aftermath of the robot revolution. The robots have a benevolent purpose, so rather than enslaving humans, they give humans microchip implants and send them to reeducation classes where the humans learn to be peaceful and obedient -- sort of Nineteen Eighty-Four with robots playing the role of Big Brother. How benevolence squares with the slaughter of humans before reeducation began or with the execution of humans who don't respond to reeducation is never explained, probably because it can't be. You'd think robots would have a better sense of logic, but logic would just get in the way of the plot.

The kids are plucky but not very bright. Kevin's idiocy causes the robots to discover his Freehold, but he arguably didn't know what he was doing. Once in the city, Nick knowingly does some blindingly stupid things. Kevin and Cass decide that attending a bot-patrolled school would be better than hiding in a basement, despite the absence of any possible reward that would offset the risk of being caught. So are three monstrously stupid kids really smart enough to defeat an entire army of revolutionary robots? They don't actually save the world, but the story sets up a sequel in which they probably will.

Gregg Rosenblum deserves credit for dealing with technology intelligently, something that isn't always present in YA science fiction. Rosenblum deserves no credit for making life inside the city improbably easy for our intrepid heroes. They need chips to avoid capture, so -- happy fortune! -- Lexi knows a doctor who can implant chips that -- happy fortune! -- are supplied by a tech-wise kid whose reeducation apparently didn't work very well. Our heroes want to attend school so -- happy fortune! -- the tech-wise kid is able to hack into the school computer and fabricate school records for them. The bots are ridiculously easy to defeat in combat -- one of the kids even manages to beat up a bot -- which makes one wonder why adults couldn't successfully mount a counter-revolution before the three plucky kids give it a try.

To be fair, this is young adult fiction, so perhaps it is meant to be formulaic and unchallenging. It isn't the kind of high quality young adult fiction that Robert Heinlein used to write -- the kind that adults can still enjoy more than half a century after it first appeared -- but Rosenblum's writing style is fluid and the main characters are likable despite their density. While a young reader's reaction to Revolution 19 might therefore be more favorable than mine, I'd recommend that young readers with an interest in robots search out some old Asimov stories. They're easy reading but they're also about intelligent people (and intelligent robots) who behave in intelligent ways.

NOT RECOMMENDED