My thoughts

I got to this book because of a video game. The Invincible game is based on it. I ended-up whish-listing it and purchased it during Steam sales.

The game is pretty good, great visuals and voice acting, a first person exploratory experience with some decision making here and there. It’s really good, I recommend giving it a try (even if you don’t want to read the book).

After finishing the game I picked up the book and wanted to see if the two universes are comparable. Are the visuals and actions matching those from the book, is there a deadly type of evolution taking place on Regis III, is the Cyclops machine as deadly as it appears in the video game?

Back to the book. The action takes place on the planet Regis III, as the spaceship The Invincible arrives here to try and find out what happened to the sister ship Condor that stopped sending any updates a while ago (a year if I remember right).

Once they land on the planet, set their base and surround it with a force field, they start sending missions on the surface of the planet to try and find what happened to the other crew.

Having played the game it made it so much easier and fun to imagine the landscape. The game did a good job on the visuals related to the planet surface, and all the alien elements that they are would encounter.

The most interesting and fun part is the idea of an evolution of autonomous, self-replicated machines that they call “flies” at the beginning, for lack of a better description, that have taken place on Regis III for God knows how many millions of years.

They end up facing this perfectly adapted “organism”, which managed to evolve by killing all the other machines that competed for the resources on the planet.

You get a bit of everything here: a civilization that started populating the galaxy using autonomous machines, survival of the fittest between the machines once they’ve been left alone, hive-mind behavior, a fear of the unknown surrounding this unprecedented way of evolution.

Note

There is a slight difference between the game and the book. They do share the same universe, and a large part of the story, but the game is set one (1) year before the book. So in the game you actually do get a better understanding of what happened to the Condor ship.

By playing the game you get more info on the actions that took place before The Invincible arrived to investigate the Condor.