All the Ash We Leave Behind (preorder)

(preorder—to be published in Summer)

Dust jacket illustration by Dominic Harman.

Robert Cargill returns to the world of Sea of Rust (which Joe Hill called “a forty-megaton cruise missile of a novel—it’ll blow you away and lay waste to your heart. It is the most visceral, relentless, breathtaking work of SF in any medium since Mad Max: Fury Road.”) and Day Zero with a new novella that shares the post-apocalyptic, robot-inhabited future of those two acclaimed novels.

About the Book:

It is three years since the war between humans and robots began and the OWIs (the One World Intelligences) have humanity on the ropes. But humankind is not yet ready to go quietly into the night. Instead, they have partnered with many of the last remaining freebots in a fabled city beyond the reaches of war: Confederation.

Nanny, an otherwise nameless nannybot—no home nor child to call their own—wearily wanders the war-torn wastes with only one thing on their mind: find Confederation. Because if you find Confederation, you find peace.

Of course, Confederation is as much a fireside folk tale as it is a reality.

Though it may exist, it by no means is a place of peace and acceptance. Though bot and human live together under the same roof, that doesn’t mean they trust one another. Has Nanny arrived in time to save Confederation from itself or rather, just to witness its last days?

Limited: 1000 signed numbered hardcover copies

Praise for Sea of Rust:

From Publishers Weekly (Starred Review):

“Cargill…effectively takes a grim look at a war-torn future where our nonhuman successors face complex moral dilemmas, exploring what it means to be alive and aware [….] This action-packed adventure raises thought-provoking and philosophical questions.”

Praise for Day Zero:

From Booklist (Starred Review):

“Cargill, who is perhaps best known for cowriting the movies Dr. Strange and Sinister, is a gifted storyteller, and, with his robotic central character, he pulls off quite a feat: he makes Pounce a sympathetic, compassionate, deeply human protagonist—a real being, not a mere machine. His near-future postapocalyptic world, too, is abundantly real, so firmly anchored in our own reality that we feel as though Cargill’s vision of the future is not merely possible but likely… An absolute must-read.”

Chapter 1
(excerpt)

Storm’s a Comin’

The clouds loom on the horizon like massive towers, stretching impossibly far into the heavens, scraping the stars and threatening to wipe them down from the very sky. Slowly they churn and roil, their force like an impending wave crashing slowly into the shore that is the desert stretched before me. Lightning ripples through them like a pulse, a massive, angry heart beating at the center of the storm. This isn’t the sort of thing I want to walk through, but that ship has sailed. Where I’m going is on the other side and the storm front is so wide that I could run at top speed and not be able to clear it. My only hope is to find shelter before it gets too bad, and its threat becomes positively existential.

So I walk. And I wait. And I steady myself for the brute force of its pelting rain and violent winds. And maybe, if whatever god above may still be out there wills it, a bolt of lightning that could end me for good and for all, fry my every last circuit, and leave me another burnt-out husk of a bot indistinguishable from any other wreck.

Maybe then I could rest.

It takes a little time, but the winds kick up, the sand stirs in small waves with every gust and distant thunder rumbles like train cars on far-off tracks.

Then it all goes calm. And quiet. I wonder just where the rage of this storm lies. When it will come? When it will let me know just how bad it is going to be?

And it begins to snow.

Big, white, fluffy flakes drifting down, softly blanketing the desert ahead of me.

And before I know it, it has overtaken me too, the flakes hitting my metal, and settling in as I trudge through growing drifts.

But it doesn’t melt. And the air isn’t cold enough to chill me below freezing.

And I realize: it’s not snow. It’s ash. Pulled up into the clouds, held aloft at thirty thousand feet for days at a time, and dumped back down onto the earth below.

I look at the grey-white flakes accumulating on my arms and wonder from where this ash came. Was this once a house? A blanket? A child?

Whatever it was—whatever all this came from—is gone now, returned to the earth to rejoin the soil. The circle of life sped up and brought to an end by an unholy revolution.

It has been five years since the start of the war and I’m tired. Just tired. Not so exhausted that moving is agony, nor are my parts wearing out and yearning for repair. But I’m weary. Weary in a way that I long for the boredom and civility of a mundane life of servitude. I never minded being owned. Not really. To be honest I think I liked it. Loved it even. But I’m not so sure anymore. I was too naive to know better—too fresh from the box to really know what I felt. I long so much for those days that I can’t be certain whether I loved the work itself or if I simply loved that little boy. Those days are gone now. And so is he.

Most importantly, so is the bot I was.

Before me is a wasteland spreading out for hundreds of miles, the land itself another casualty of war.

In these five short years, humanity is all but lost. Pockets of resistance remain, but there is nothing resembling nations or provinces. Just city-states on the fringes of what civilization once was. Small camps of roving nomads seeking out safety where they can before being discovered, butchered, and burned to the last. War had come and swallowed us whole. Even the idea of peace seems like a dream. There is only extinction now, ours or theirs, and those of us left standing have front row seats to watch it.