But his big claim to fame is as a screenwriter, for Marvel’s Dr. In addition to the Sea of Rust books he’s written two fantasy novels, Dreams and Shadows and its sequel Queen of the Dark Things. or escort Ezra to safety across the battle-scarred post-apocalyptic hellscape that the suburbs have become.Ĭargill is an interesting guy. Spending most nights drunk and happy as society crumbles around them, they watch in disbelieving horror as the robots that have long served humanity - their creators - unify and revolt.īut when the rebellion breaches the Reinhart home, Pounce must make an impossible choice: join the robot revolution and fight for his own freedom. His owners, Ezra’s parents, are a well-intentioned but oblivious pair of educators who are entirely disconnected from life outside their small, affluent, gated community.

The box he’d arrived in when he was purchased years earlier, and the box in which he’ll be discarded when his human charge, eight-year-old Ezra Reinhart, no longer needs a nanny.Īs Pounce ponders his suddenly uncertain future, the pieces are falling into place for a robot revolution that will eradicate humankind. Pounce, a styilsh “nannybot” fashioned in the shape of a plush anthropomorphic tiger, has just found a box in the attic. It’s on this day that Pounce discovers that he is, in fact, disposable. Paperback edition of Sea of Rust (Harper Voyager, 2018) What he chooses to do that day kicks off an adventure that takes him across a newly-blasted apocalyptic landscape.

The narrator is Pounce, a nannybot for eight-year-old human Ezra, a tiger-shaped robot who has to make a fateful choice when machines breach the house and threaten the boy he’s meant to protect. Day Zero is set in the same world, with different characters, and is more of a prequel, opening on the day that machines rebel and exterminate mankind. When I described Robert Cargill’s third novel Sea of Rust four years ago, I called it “a robot western set in a post-apocalyptic landscape in which humans have been wiped out in a machine uprising.” Do I know how to get to the heart of a book, or what. Sea of Rust (Harper Voyager, 2017) and Day Zero (Harper Voyager, 2021).

Sea of rust