Read it for the Mad Max style robot on robot action and the full on nature of the story, stay for sense of loss, the gorgeous prose and the unforgettable yet somehow re-affirming bleakness. Recommended.

Sea of Rust is modern, smart fiction that belies it’s majesty with a light touch. One of the science fiction books you should read this year.

Like a mecha Mad Max, Sea of Rust follows a band of misfits fighting to survive against a scorched, barren landscape. Drawing on Western and war movie traditions, with a philosophical heart that asks big questions about life, death, and the soul, this is accomplished, technically complex scifi.

The novel does not stint on action and violence, but what lingers in the mind are its brutal vision of a world cannibalising itself and the poignant questions it raises about soul and sentience.

The book itself is a delightful patchwork of the familiar: the author skilfully blends Asimov (with an interesting twist on the laws of robotics), the Borg from Star Trek, Terminator and even a generous slice of Alice in Wonderland for good measure. These are themes we are familiar with, but arranged in such a way that we can never be quite sure what is going to happen next. I read Sea of Rust in a single day, which is testimony to just how engaging the storyline was.

A very exciting page-turner.

Think WALL-E meets MAD MAX in this rumbumptious but also empathetic turbo-charged tale… Wonderfully evocative, a minor masterpiece and certainly quite different from anything else you’ve read for a long time.

Like an AI-centred, desert-bound twist on Children of Men, this is a sensitive and smart novel that surprises you with its depth of feeling.