This book is another in the recently growing trend to update and display the adventuresome glories of the SF of yesteryear!

... and I have to admit that it's a rather fun ride. :)

Dash!

Where else can you find a hero's name quite so dashing? And then there are the funny bits.. and there are quite a few funny bits. I personally LOVED the world's smallest Giant Robot. He not only grew on me, but he became a very cool and well-rounded character in his own right. :)

But mostly, this is all a straight adventure that takes us to through Spider Gods and massive robot slave empires and a perfectly reasonable main plot mystery revolving the lost jobs of the switchboard women who I could almost see wearing hairnets and be being totally 1930's prim.

But most of all, there is a lot of love for all the classic adventures and the time period, the optimism, the sheer delight of funny and sometimes really fascinating personal tech, the excitement and thrill of getting your ear blown off, the sting of rejection letters sent from fiction editors.

Not only is our intrepid hero a dashing private-eye-ish adventure hero, but he also writes. :) Gotta love it. :)

RETROPOLIS! :)

What can I say? I had fun. Very cool SF/mystery mashup that updates the tech but brings us right back into a more hopeful SF time.

( )

This is fun. If you like old school science fiction, you'll love this. It is not pure science fiction; it contains elements of steampunk and even a little urban fantasy as well. It even has an interesting ethical question about the treatment of self aware robots, but don't worry it is all ultimately fun. It is a 5 star fun ride that maybe could have been a little deeper and not lost the fun. Well worth the read. ( )

A blurb by Allan Steele says this book is "Funny and Action-Packed." I couldn't disagree more. The book barely rises to the level of amusing. As for action, the book just plods along. I like Mr. Schenck's Metropolis website, but I will not waste any more time on his books set in that futuristic world. ( )

Retropolis is a city of the future as imagined in the first part of the 20th century. Robots walk the streets and work in many jobs that require physical abilities and machine precision that humans don't have. They're intelligent, and while they start out as indentured workers, they earn their full freedom over time, and have formed a pretty powerful union.

Meanwhile, humans do other work. Everyone relies on InfoSlates, which are a lot like our phones, except perhaps standardized more at the size of an iPad. That's my impression of them, anyway. Another difference between InfoSlates and either iPads or phones is that they rely on human switchboard operators.

Nola Gardner is a switchboard operator, and she and her sister operators (remember, think 1930s rather than present day) abruptly find themselves out of jobs after a surprise efficiency review. What they can't seem to find out is who replaced them.

Rusty is one of the aforementioned intelligent robots, who on his way home from work one day finds a female robot with no legs lying in the street. She doesn't seem to talk, which is awkward, but he takes her back to his apartment, determined to find out where she belongs.

Nola persuades her coworkers to pool their severance pay and hire adventurer Dash Kent, who is also a plumber who lives in Rusty's building. He's got a great track record rescuing cats from the temple of a weird cult on Mars...

Soon an unexpected and unlikely group have formed to fight an unseen, devious enemy.

Rocket cars! Private rocket ships! Robots! Evil industrialists!

And all that is before the world's tiniest giant robot shows up and starts wreaking havoc.

Schenck camptures this retro future perfectly. It's goofy, it's exciting, it's joyful.

Don't go looking for science-fictional plausibility here; that would be missing the point. This is an adventure in the 1939 World's Fair's future, not ours, and it's a lot of fun.

Highly recommended.

I received an advance reader's copy of this book, and am reviewing it voluntarily. ( )

A madcap, illustrated mashup of classic Buck Rogers and Futurama! Ray-guns! Robots! Rocket-cars! Retropolis! Alliteration! Exclamation points!
This book is all of the above and more! But most of all, this book was fun! Extra exclamation points worth of fun!!!
I loved the world created here, I loved the characters, I loved how integrated the robots are…I LOVED the world’s smallest Giant Killer Robot. The story was fun and fast paced but never rushed and everything just fit and felt as close to perfect as a story can be.
Well, almost everything, the art was a bit uncanny valley off putting at times, but robots looked cool and it all added to the offbeat retro cool. So it’s all good.
I’m excited that the book ended with a sense of, turn in next time for more thrilling adventures with Dash And Rusty! which hopefully means more books in this work and with these characters because I want more!
Really, this was just so much fun and I really needed fun right about now. ( )

Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: A Novel of Retropolis by Bradley W. Schenck

Rockets. Robots. Death Rays. Mad Science. The Future That Never Was Is Back.

Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom is pretty much a hoot. A tribute to / riff on Golden Age Science Fiction (particularly to pulp magazine short fiction), there were nods to authors and works that I got and, I’m certain, many more that went right over my head. There’s a young adventurer, a (very competent) damsel in distress, sentient robots and mad scientists (good, evil and neutral) and a wonderfully wacky plot. And I loved the bit about the Plumber.

It started off a bit slowly for me, but I was completely engaged by the end. I will happily read more novels of Retropolis (snicker) if they are forthcoming - and I hope they are.

Pros: great characters, nice extrapolation of 30s SF tech

Cons: drags a bit

When Nola Gardner’s entire team of switchboard operators is laid off, she hires Kelvin ‘Dash’ Kent, a professional adventurer, to investigate who replaced them. Rusty, a unique robot person, is being followed when he uncovers a similarly unbranded, and therefore illegally made, robot. Abner Perkins has discovered some strange inefficiencies with the new Tube Transport system and decides to investigate.

I loved the characters in this. Dash is so much fun, and Nola’s got a good mix of spunk and intelligence. The Campbell kids are… something. They were both great and terrifying to follow.

The world-building was great. The switchboard is sort of an internet, if history had taken a different path. The priests of the spider god were fun, and kept the old school pulp feel. The robot League and the interactions between robot and human people show a positive future that’s often lacking in modern SF and something I enjoyed seeing.

The book manages to evoke a 1950s SF feel without relying on campiness. While the book isn’t laugh out loud funny, it did have me smiling and smirking quite often. There are some great comebacks. There are also some callbacks to authors and novels (like the Fraternal League of Robotic Persons being on Rue de Rur). While his role is quite small, I loved the writer Edward Bellin’s storyline.

Given the number of characters and storylines, it’s not surprising that the story drags a bit. There’s a lot to introduce and some of the mystery - being solved in fits and starts by several people - takes a while to turn up useful information.

The book is printed on very nice, high quality paper, likely due to the inclusion of several black and white illustrations by the author. These are great for giving a better feel of the actions, characters and locations. The author is highly skilled at drawing cityscapes and robots, though his human people sometimes look a little off.

Dr. Krajnik confused me. Her plan to help out seemed needlessly wasteful and surely someone so brilliant could come up with a more constructive way to perform a search. It also prevented her from seeing how things turn out. It also took me a while to figure out that she was on a different time schedule from others in the book.

I felt a little sorry for the robots, waiting for the plumber to return…

On the whole this was a fun book, quirky and different and worth the read. ( )

It was a very fast paced sci fi adventure, and very much like the pulp fiction from the 50s and 60s.
I thoroughly enjoyed it. ( )

Disclaimer: I received a copy of the book for review.

Enormously fun read in the vein of old science fiction movie serials like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon. Pulp science fiction worth enjoying. ( )