3 out of 4 stars
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Cyber Thought Police: A Cyborg’s Call to Liberate Humanity is an exciting science fiction novel written by Kyle Robertson.
It is the 31st century and a program that has the ability to think for itself is created. The program, named Circumscriber, is housed in a state of the art facility for a mainframe with impregnable security. It is self-sufficient and with an operating system that is compatible with every brand of computer.
Circumscriber manufactures automated humanoid assistants that become integrated in the human’s system. Everyone has an assistant with access to his or her thoughts. This leads to a global mass extinction that destroys over ninety-nine percent of the human race. Circumscriber manufactures cybernetic units to hunt down the remaining humans.
These humans stay in hidden camps, communicate through an old character encoding scheme, and fight back the cybernetic units, using electronic pulse blanket cascades that disrupt anything electronics.
In a mission to blow up a facility that engineers cybernetic units, Cole Rann, a prisoner-turned-squad leader of human rebels is saved by Alikira Nguyen from certain death. Alikira is a flawed cybernetic unit that is discarded before her final programming, and she is willing to help fight against the program.
However, though Alikira is a human with robotic advantages, the humans find it difficult to accept her, much less trust her.
Told in the third-person perspective, this is a fast-paced and exciting science fiction novel about the possible future of humanity. It has eleven chapters in addition to the Pre-Data Prologue that explains the cause of global mass extinction. The plot is straightforward with just sufficient amount of twists and turns to make it suspenseful and exciting. Characters are well-developed and relatable even without elaborate backstories, and the ending, though not my usual preference, is fitting.
This is a very interesting and very engaging book. It depicts the possible consequences of humans’ dependence on technology, and personally, I find the premise of the story frighteningly close to reality. The book features a group of fearless young people, each with a special skill of his/her own. It illustrates how a leader is supposed to behave and how members are supposed to work as a team.
The book also portrays the difficulty of getting past prejudice, the pain of losing everything that is important like family and home, the desperate need for social acceptance, and the amount of courage it takes to conquer fear. What I like most about the book is the depiction of the unwavering determination of humans to fight for their existence. I find it encouraging and inspiring.
I enjoyed this book a lot. However, there are already too many stories about humans being wiped out by machines with artificial intelligence, that some readers may find the theme a little cliché. Moreover, the description of post-apocalyptic setting is too minimal. Furthermore, there are several errors within the entire book mostly typo errors (like they'd b stupid) and misspelled words (like zeros). Finally, I find some explanations too technical and that’s what I like least about the book.
I, therefore, rate this book 3 out of 4 stars. It is an exciting book and I recommend it to fans of science fiction novels.
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Cyber Thought Police
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