What do you think?
Rate this book
Robot Asteroid
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 25, 2026
This novel is a hodgepodge of styles and standard plotlines, trying to do too much with too little organization. The promo material sets it up pretty well:
“Robot Asteroid follows three researchers racing against both a bizarre plague and a crumbling, Orwellian society to decode an ancient riddle foretelling the current collapse of the Earth’s weather.”
This is two different novels imperfectly intermeshed. One is a zombie movie, the other a “Chariots of the Gods” Sci-Fi interpretation of prehistoric visits by alien beings. Unfortunately, these are very different in style and material, appealing to very different reading audiences.
Good Sci-Fi requires that any hi-tech science sounds at least possible. This doesn’t. It teems with improbability. Two Mars-bound astronauts intercept an asteroid containing the remains of an old hi-tech Ancient Egyptian outpost which had been infested by a plague which turns humans into robots. They return to Earth in a space shuttle thousands of years old and instigate a zombie gorefest. You know the sort: living humans erupting in bodily fluids, heads and arms being torn off in gouts of blood. Screams and moans, the latter being mostly from readers induced to experience this sort of pornography of violence.
A major problem involves inconsistency. In one place, the robots are cold and…well…robotic. Later on, they are evil, toying with their victims. Some are torn apart, others inflicted with the plague, with no apparent distinction or reason.
And this mayhem leads up to a sudden happy ending from a different book, full of pleasantly tied up loose ends and running gags.
There are all sorts of good ideas and creative thinking in this novel, and I suppose there is a market for it, but it isn’t anything I picture many of my readers enjoying.
“Robot Asteroid follows three researchers racing against both a bizarre plague and a crumbling, Orwellian society to decode an ancient riddle foretelling the current collapse of the Earth’s weather.”
This is two different novels imperfectly intermeshed. One is a zombie movie, the other a “Chariots of the Gods” Sci-Fi interpretation of prehistoric visits by alien beings. Unfortunately, these are very different in style and material, appealing to very different reading audiences.
Good Sci-Fi requires that any hi-tech science sounds at least possible. This doesn’t. It teems with improbability. Two Mars-bound astronauts intercept an asteroid containing the remains of an old hi-tech Ancient Egyptian outpost which had been infested by a plague which turns humans into robots. They return to Earth in a space shuttle thousands of years old and instigate a zombie gorefest. You know the sort: living humans erupting in bodily fluids, heads and arms being torn off in gouts of blood. Screams and moans, the latter being mostly from readers induced to experience this sort of pornography of violence.
A major problem involves inconsistency. In one place, the robots are cold and…well…robotic. Later on, they are evil, toying with their victims. Some are torn apart, others inflicted with the plague, with no apparent distinction or reason.
And this mayhem leads up to a sudden happy ending from a different book, full of pleasantly tied up loose ends and running gags.
There are all sorts of good ideas and creative thinking in this novel, and I suppose there is a market for it, but it isn’t anything I picture many of my readers enjoying.
Displaying 1 of 1 review