Scrap

This is another lively and enjoyable underdog story by the author of the celebrated Stitch Head series.

Scrap is a tiny, rusty, lonely humanoid living on a pile of junk on a planet occupied exclusively by robots. Planet Somewhere 513 was intended as a new colony for Earthlings after they had ruined their own planet but – following the robot revolution (or ‘Slight Disagreement’ as the robots call it) – the hyper-intelligent cyborgs rejected their human creators and decided to make the planet a robots-only place forever.

On Scrap’s planet the only things that matter are putting robots first and ‘upgrading’ as often as possible. Robots are constantly on the hunt for the latest trade-up for their casings, resulting in huge piles of discarded exoskeletons littering the landscape. One of these piles in Scrap’s home. It is clear from the outset that he has shunned the way of life enjoyed by all the other robots and, instead, is living out an endless existence in a battered, antique shell surrounded by scrap…and he is obviously miserable about it.

Two unexpected visitors to Scrap’s pile force him to reconsider his anti-social reclusion. Impossibly, the pair seem to know about his dramatic past as the once human-loving ‘king of the robots’ – a history that he barely remembers himself! Even more impossibly, the pair of visitors are children…human children! They are definitely not supposed to be there.

The discovery of human children ignites a breathless drama featuring countless escapes from Terminator-like hunters, as Scrap stands up to robots several times his size and strength, in an effort to understand his past and to rescue the children from certain death.

It is an exciting story set in an imagined future that will appeal to young sci-fi fans. Bass’s take on the dystopian space-age novel is original in its focus upon the notion of ‘upgrading’ and its parallels with evolution. It asks whether shinier and newer always means better, and whether artificially intelligent life forms would be any more likely to look after their world than humans are.

Though Scrap is an enjoyable gateway into such philosophical debate, it is also very much the familiar, jovial, heartwarming story that fans of Bass’s other books will expect. Characters ranging from evil, despotic overlords to clueless, loveable helper-bots all have jokes to share and the relationship that grows between Scrap and his young charges is beautifully described.