A novel by Roger Mize
Somewhere on a planet you won't find on any star chart, a small repairman just asked a question no one else dared to.
Before Liftoff
This story takes place on a planet you won't find on any star chart. No forests grow there, no seas roar, no birds fly. Its entire surface is covered in factory-cities, inhabited by robots.
Every city gathers its own power, guards its borders, repairs its roads, reads its ancient blueprints, and builds new cities. Everything runs so smoothly that the citizens almost never ask why their world works the way it does.
Almost never — because in one of those cities lives a small repair-bot named Ro. He notices the ordinary things everyone else walks past without looking up.
If factories build robots, Ro thinks, and factories build other factories, then who built the very first one? What's written in the Great Book? Why can a stranger's instructions make an entire city turn against itself? And most of all: if a robot can move, and talk, and fix itself — does that mean it's alive?
The answers will have to be found along the way. Some of them, it turns out, look strangely like what's happening inside every one of us.
Roger Mize spent years studying the impossibly small machinery that keeps living things running — then decided the best way to explain it was to build an entire planet out of it.
Journey to the Planet of Robots is his first book.
The book isn't out yet. Send a note and you'll hear the moment that changes.
hello@rogermize.com