Robot by Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg

Robot by Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This philosophical sub-genre of SF starts off as a chthonic and claustrophobic whimsical story and soars off to abstract levels in the vein of Cordwainer Smith. There are echoes of Philip K. Dick’s paranoid angst and China Miéville’s mystical eeriness; reality is bent into an Eschereque vertiginous topology. Free will is questioned along the lines of The Matrix series of films – a creation of the author’s fellow Poles – the gender-fluid Wachowski siblings. At times reads like the autobiography of a human parasite like a hook worm or Plasmodium – fluids, tubes, mucous, orifices, peristalsis, periods of quiescence/dormancy in form of spores or eggs interspersed with periods of hyperactivity. There is a long tract where it appears like a Lewis Carrollesque Alice discussing existentialism from the point of view of a chicken or a wheat plant.
A must-read for SF aficionados.

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