The Automatic Detective

"The Automatic Detective" is a funny, creative, relentlessly entertaining take on the hard-boiled detective story. I liked it even more than I expected to.

When this story begins the titular character, Mac, isn't a detective. Mac was designed by a mad scientist to be a killing machine, but he bucked his programming. Now he's a taxi driver trying to keep his nose clean while he's on probation, hoping to be recognized as a fully sentient citizen of Empire City. Mac is a meticulous, dull, self-obsessed loner, but he has managed to accumulate a few friends in spite of himself. When his next-door neighbors go missing Mac is the only one who gives a damn. Forced out of his comfort zone, he finds a new purpose in life.

This is a fun combination of a sort of comic book-y retro-future setting, featuring robots, mutants, and flying cars, and a hard-boiled detective story complete with seedy jazz clubs, trench coats and fedoras, and a buxom dame. (For the record, the buxom dame also happens to be an engineering genius, which I thoroughly approve of.)

I like this kind of genre-blending when it's done well, and Martinez does it very well. The world-building is great; it manages to be amusingly playful with both its detective and SF tropes, while still feeling like the world it depicts takes itself seriously. The plot's fun, too, with the robot detective (or, rather, robot killing machine-turned cab driver-turned detective) of the title investigating the show more disappearance of his neighbors only to find himself in the middle of something much, much bigger. By the end, there are alien conspiracies and action-packed robot fights, and all kind of entertaining things.

The one thing I'm unhappy with about this one is that, barring one short story, there don't seem to be any sequels. It ends in a way that seems like a great setup for an ongoing series, but apparently that never happened. Pity. I'd definitely be on board for it. show less

Adams-Chandler Jambalaya (aka [b:The Automatic Detective|1265289|The Automatic Detective|A. Lee Martinez|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1312026748s/1265289.jpg|1254169])

Gently brown one abducted family in heavy cast iron sci-fi universe seasoned with mutant-inducing radiation.
Remove family, leaving well-oiled universe.

In the same universe, sautée:
-A seven-hundred sixteen pound (robot) cab driver trying to keep a low profile until he clears probation.
-One (genius) blonde dame with a thing for robots.
-One overworked (mutant) detective who resembles a white rat
Cook until tender, or at least everybody understands they have a case to solve.

Stir in liquid from a jazz club, a seedy flophouse and a penthouse suite.
Season with small-time show more thug, one female (cybernetic) psychologist and a handful of broken arms (all from the same thug).
Return family to pot, and simmer in secret location while covered for an hour.

Bring to boil and add two factions of feuding aliens.
Cover and simmer without stirring (may use big guns, a bot with a Brooklynese accent and a sentient gorilla).
The dish is finished when the aliens have cooked.

Truly a delightful dish. The initial chapters have a great take on the noir detective book, but instead of a jaundiced, rough detective, the lead is an emotion-impaired bot who has been subjected to "the Freewill Glitch," an unpredictable error imbuing robots with ability to override programming. (Don't you just love that free will is called a "glitch?") Martinez cleverly hamstrings the virtually indestructible robot by limiting his power through immense electrical costs, demanding careful energy management.

Action starts off quickly within the first few pages, allowing development of the robot character as he mulls his interpretations and actions in a thoroughly Sam Spade way. Like the noir detective, the best intentions soon draw him into a path that shakes up his routine but empty life. I worried we were headed into silliness when the gorilla appeared, but truly, Martinez is able to keep the focus on the plot even as his tongue is firmly in cheek. He is able to create the feel of the emotionally drained noir detective in a thoroughly delightful way. Once the noir atmosphere and character development is fully underway, Martinez begins throwing curveballs and dastardly evil villains at our hero, and then it gets truly odd. The bot character ends up being a great anchor through the fantastical, as he negotiates the very real challenges of friendship, ethics and complex decision-making.

A fast read, and one I will plan to re-read at some point, as I dream of electric sheep--or at least of Martinez writing a sequel. show less

This book makes my brain hurt. It’s a story published in 2008, set in the future but written in a 1940s noir style from the point of view of someone in the 1970s. If that doesn’t make your head spin, you’re not a biological as they say in this world.

Our hero is Mack Megaton, a 716 lb. robot, built by an evil criminal mastermind to be an enforcer but now working as a cabbie in Empire, (aka Mutantburg. Robotville. The Big Gray Haze, or The City That Never Functions). When one of his human friends and her children get kidnapped by a four-armed mutant, Mack sets out to track them down and rescue them.

What really makes this story is the author’s keen ear for dry noir humor and his tongue-in-cheek style ability to create a world show more where a beautiful dame like Lucia Napier, could fall for a big, and I mean big, bot like Mack. I also loved how Martinez slipped in the cynical philosophizing that is a quintessential part of all noir fiction. After all, ” A bot had to find his own way, and I’d figured out that functioning for function’s sake was pointless. The real question was finding a directive worth getting scrapped for.”
4 stars
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FYI: On a 5-point scale I assign stars based on my assessment of what the book needs in the way of improvements:
*5 Stars – Nothing at all. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
*4 Stars – It could stand for a few tweaks here and there but it’s pretty good as it is.
*3 Stars – A solid C grade. Some serious rewriting would be needed in order for this book to be considered great or memorable.
*2 Stars – This book needs a lot of work. A good start would be to change the plot, the character development, the writing style and the ending.
*1 Star - The only thing that would improve this book is a good bonfire. show less

An altogether excellent gumshoe robot crime alien monster dystopian future madness thing. It's even got a bit of strange but touching romance.

Fry up a slab of Martha Wells' Murderbot with a dash of Ghostbusters and you'd have something not entirely unlike this book.

Many a humorous story has been spoiled for me by excessive silliness but Martinez manages just enough restraint to push all my buttons for all five stars.

e.g.
"Whatever I didn’t say must’ve struck something in Sanchez’s finely honed cop instincts. He could always read me like a technical manual. His expression didn’t change, and he didn’t say anything. But there was something about the way he didn’t say it."

Dresden Files, move over. The Automatic Detective has stolen my heart as the best scifi/fantasy-detective noir crossover out there. The characters are fun and funny and it is a well-written, enjoyable spoof that carries and twists all of the tropes of the noir genre.
Our first-person narrator and PI, Mack Megatron, is an AI-driven robot, which, created to help destroy civilization by a mad genius, unexpectedly developed the "Freewill Glitch" and refused to kill. So now he's trying to eke out a living in the big city as a cab driver while waiting out his probation. As the first killer robot to get the Freewill Bug, the city is still waiting to see if he'll snap back to his violent programming. He isn't adjusting too well--he can't really show more understand how "biologicals" think and, despite quite a few sessions with a robot psychiatrist, he still thinks of himself as a machine rather than a person. Isolated and practically friendless, he spends a lot of time on low power, staring blankly at his refrigerator. But suddenly he's forced to snap into action. When one of the few families who is kind to him, his next-door-neighbors, are kidnapped, Mack forswears logic (that requires turning off his "difference engine") and sets out to find them. The remaining adventure pulls elements from standard noir--femme fatals, gangsters, and banter abound--and science fiction--almost everyone in the town has some sort of mutation due to vast amounts of pollutants--in a completely original way and from a totally new perspective epitomized by his appearance: a bright red robot wandering around in trenchcoat and fedora.
Take the common "hardboiled detective novel" tropes:
--Hardboiled: Mack can take some damage, all right. He was built as a tool of destruction, after all.
--Totally blunt and direct: "My shrink says I should work on my social subroutine."
--Daddy issues: Most noir heroes have sad pasts, usually due to family issues: abuse, being orphaned, etc. Mack's creator was a mad genius, now housed in an asylum-come-prison, and Mack was programmed to be loyal to him. That ends up creating quite a bit of inner conflict.
--Femme Fatals: the lovely Lucia Napier has her sights firmly set on seducing--or at least confusing--Mack. He starts out being extremely bemused by her flirtation, only able to identify it via statistical analysis. He also keeps thinking of her as being squishy:
"Attractive to 92 percent of the average biological populace with an eight point margin based on personal preference."
--Damsel in distress: the mother and daughter Mack is out to find, the only people, before Lucia, who got near to his armor-crushing strength.
--Idiotic closemouthedness: much of the plot of a noir novel is driven by the protagonist's completely stupid unwillingness to trust anyone or tell anyone about what he has discovered. A new twist: the bad guys stick a worm in Mack's programming. He literally can't tell anyone about what's going on.

Fun and brilliant as a spoof, this book sold itself by the characters. Maybe they're not totally deep, but they have entertaining quirks and are extremely sympathetic. Robot or no, Mack Megatron is the most human and sympathetic protagonist I've read for quite a bit. show less

The Automatic Detective is a delight. Down the mean streets of Empire City strides Mack Megaton, a robot who is not himself mean, but is looking for a purpose to his existence. He finds one when the nice family next door is abducted, and this killer robot turned cab driver must become a private eye, finding his way through a baffling world of mutants, superscience, and a femme who just might be fatale. Mack, who suffers from a Freewill Glitch that kept him from being the killer machine he was programmed to be, must struggle with his own programming, his changing ideas about life, and most of all, those unpredictable biologicals. Martinez ably juggles mystery, action, humor, and the underlying question of what constitutes consciousness, show more and humanity.

Martinez has fun with the clichés of both the hard-boiled detective genre and old-fashioned pulp sf. Empire is The Gernsback Continuum if things didn't really work out the way the technocrats had hoped. As is traditional in the hard-boiled genre, what at first seems a relatively simple case soon finds Mack in way over his head, but like Philip Marlowe, whom he seems to be most closely modeled on, he refuses to give up, and he stumbles upon a plot that threatens the very existence of Empire City.

The secondary characters are quirky and interesting, even the simple butler robot, and the book is for the most part well and tightly written. The end easily sets the stage for a sequel, and I would definitely read any future Mack Megaton investigations. show less