For a retired, currently nameless battle robot who has spent the past several decades in peaceful self-isolation studying chemical signaling in ants, waking up in a rusty bathtub with one leg missing was quite the shock. So they set out to find it, aided by Atticus the unexpectedly snarky cyborg dog, a talented human mechanic named Murphy and a motley crew of mecha. As it turns out, the stakes of this search are much higher than their own ambulatory capabilities.
Suzanne Palmer’s Ode to the Half-Broken is an exciting addition to the “postapocalyptic robot/human hero’s journey” subgenre of speculative fiction. With neither the caustic satire of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model nor the relentless optimism of Becky Chambers’ Psalm for the Wild-Built, it steadily ramps up from a meditative meander through the wasteland that was once New England to the triumphant denouement of a Tom Clancy novel. Palmer accomplishes this with solid pacing, frequent insights into human nature (often delivered via talking dog) and a steady dose of humor by turns trenchant and puerile.
Such humor is almost obligatory in this literary niche. After all, catastrophe has clearly struck: The cities are empty ruins, and even the rats and pigeons are gaunt and ragged. But Palmer’s United States did not fall to ruin due to vengeful mecha rampaging through the streets or all the smart refrigerators of the world shutting down the internet. Humans destroyed it because some were greedy, others were angry and the rest followed orders even after they stopped making sense. Palmer portrays the mecha as fundamentally beneficent, forced into violence only through coercion or outright torture from humans.
Despite being set amid an apocalyptic near-future hellscape, Ode to the Half-Broken is a surprisingly hopeful and fun reading experience. There are fragments of a utopian future where mecha and humans work in tandem to repair their ruined biosphere, complete with drone pollinator swarms and mechanized firefighters. And in the grand tradition of hero’s journeys, the villains are only really frightening from a distance. As ends of the world go, it could certainly be worse.