Hillsboro, OR, October 22, 2024 –Robot, Run! – The Hidden Perils of Suicide is Volume 3 of Russell Lee Baldwin’s Catapult of Singularity series. This novel transports readers to a Los Angeles of 2099, where the skies are blue, robocabs need no steering wheels, and programmed rainfall appears wherever things need to grow.
Robot, Run! creates a future view of AI’s dominance over humankind, fleshed out in a lurid world which bathes the senses. This future is a happy place, with an ironic twist. The fun-loving IRS has declared suicide a capital crime, if committed for the purpose of evading taxes. Yes, they’ll execute tax cheats for killing themselves.
Of course the missing step is bringing these scofflaws back to stand trial, and much of the novel therefore rests on the quest for extended human lifespan. Pharma companies don’t like that: immortality is bad for the pill business.
Baldwin’s unique scene setting thrusts readers forward from today’s science to technological implications as breathtaking as they are plausible to the critical thinker. His propulsive language takes its cue from the impersonal way business operates today and casts it forward into a world top-heavy with brilliant AI robots, including some persuasive and sexy ones.
As noted by D. Donovan for the Midwest Book Review: Readers should expect challenging complexities to this world and its vastly revised cultural and technological norms… Robot, Run! is a full-bodied probe into the future, expressed in meaningful conflict… fresh and original ideas play within these pages. Robot, Run is a must-read for futurists and fans of speculative fiction, due to eerily plausible outcomes of AI’s dominance over every human life. Baldwin’s story world is steeped in social and political oddities, and the power and foibles of AI.