A.I. didn’t destroy humanity. It didn’t save us, either.

Charlie7 is the progenitor of a mechanical race he built from the ashes of a dead world—Earth. He is a robot of leisure and idle political meddling—a retirement well-earned. Or he was, until a human girl named Eve was dropped in his lap.

Far from a failed genetics experiment, Eve is brilliant, curious, and heartbreakingly naïve about her species’ history. But Eve’s creator wants her back and has a gruesome fate planned for her. There is only one robot qualified to protect her. For the first time in a thousand years, Charlie7 has a human race to protect.

The result of 1,000 years of genetic engineering, terraforming, and painstaking toxic cleanup has resulted in the ultimate achievement of the Post-Invasion Age: a healthy human.

Her name is Eve14.

Don’t ask about the 13 Eves before her.

Humanity as we know it is no more and the robots have taken over. But the robots are not quite as unfeeling as one would think. Before the end of everything, twenty-seven of the most brilliant minds were scanned as part of a project known as Project Transhuman. Every robot that now exists is made up of an amalgam of those human minds. Everything those humans knew and thought and felt are a part of the robots – all of their jealousies, their ambitions, their hopes and dreams. All were saved and used to create a whole new world.

Extinction Reversed is a unique take on the whole ‘robots taking over after the end of the world’ trope. At one point in time it was a popular story idea and was explored in numerous different ways before eventually falling out of public consumption. J.S. Morin has brought it back in a way with his six part series titled Robot Geneticists with Extinction Reversed being the first in the series.

The characters that Morin has created for the series are an interesting bunch. The robots are all based on the same twenty-seven individuals; depending on what kind of a person is needed, pieces of three minds mixed together using a process that is never quite fully explained. This creates an individual who is both unique but also has a known quotient about them. They are human in that they have feelings and emotions yet they are in metallic bodies.

The few humans that we meet on the other hand are quite diverse. Eve, the main female character, is more like a robot than the robots she encounters. Born and raised in a lab, at 16 years old she is experiencing everything for the first time. The robot who created her made her perfect in every way and raised her in a very sterile environment. Having never been exposed to anything such as movies or books or art, she is almost akin to a living, breathing, computer.

On the other side of the human coin is Plato. The main male character, he too was created by a robot in a lab somewhere. He, however, is the complete opposite of Eve. He is temperamental, gets angry quickly, and while he is quite smart he often rushes in to situations head first. He is far from perfect and only when it is revealed that while physically he is an adult male, his mind is of a 12 year old boy, does some of his actions make sense.

Overall, I liked reading Extinction Reversed. It was interesting watching the dichotomy between robots and humans play out. Especially as it was the robots who were acting out the most. The writing can be a bit awkward at times and while the first half of the book was a little slow, it definitely picked up in the second half. I especially liked the short story at the end that revealed exactly how humanity met its end and the robots came to be.

Readers who enjoy stories based around robots taking over will likely also enjoy Extinction Reversed. Personally, I’ve already added the rest of the series to my To Be Read list and will slowly but surely be making my way through them.