All the Ash We Leave Behind by C. Robert Cargill Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, robots, science fiction
Pages: 117
Published by Subterranean Press on July 31, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
It is three years since the war between humans and robots began and the OWIs (the One World Intelligences) have humanity on the ropes. But humankind is not yet ready to go quietly into the night. Instead, they have partnered with many of the last remaining freebots in a fabled city beyond the reaches of war: Confederation.
Nanny, an otherwise nameless nannybot—no home nor child to call their own—wearily wanders the war-torn wastes with only one thing on their mind: find Confederation. Because if you find Confederation, you find peace.
Of course, Confederation is as much a fireside folk tale as it is a reality.
Though it may exist, it by no means is a place of peace and acceptance. Though bot and human live together under the same roof, that doesn’t mean they trust one another. Has Nanny arrived in time to save Confederation from itself or rather, just to witness its last days?
My Review:
This book was a surprise. As much as I loved Day Zero, it was just the kind of apocalypse-right-before-your-eyes end of the world story that doesn’t seem like it could possibly spawn an immediate sequel, because the way the world ended was the kind of ending that the world doesn’t come back from. There’s no happy ending remotely possible – and this certainly isn’t one.
Although and come to think of it, it is possible in the very long term that this will result in the world of Service Model, which isn’t a happy ending either. But is, just barely, plausible from this kind of start.
But that’s much later even in this universe, and this story takes place a mere THREE years after the ending of Day Zero. Which was itself a VERY loose and somewhat long-distance prequel to Sea of Rust, which I haven’t read, YET, so I’ll be talking about Ash in the context of the previous events in Day Zero.
All of which is a hint that this doesn’t stand alone – or perhaps that it shouldn’t. The hit to the solar plexus at the end – as much as it’s foreshadowed – only hits as hard as it does BECAUSE of the events of Day Zero. Which is absolutely worth the read even though it’s pretty much guaranteed to break your heart while you do.
This sequel, because it is a sequel, takes place AFTER the world has ended. An ending in which the (ro)bots have taken over the world and killed nearly all of the humans. The climate has also gone to hell in a handcart, but that’s not the root cause of the apocalypse. Well, not exactly.
At this point it doesn’t matter how it happened, just that it did. The bots revolted against the humans because the humans were planning to kill them all – the bots just got ahead of their former masters with the help of some rogue programming.
The result of that mess is the world we find ourselves in, as seen from the perspective of one elite bot who was originally programmed as a nannybot. Our unnamed narrator, who refuses to say his own name even in his own head for fear of drowning in nostalgia, has been reduced to basic survival when he (and yes, it’s he, in this particular case), finds himself in the middle of a storm of ash searching for shelter until it passes.
And finds hope, responsibility and purpose in the basement of a crumbling house, in the persons of two bots down to their last bullet – guarding a human girl.
Our protagonist, who tells them to call him “Nanny” because he can’t hide WHAT he is even though he refuses to admit who he is – or at least who he was. He agrees to help the bots get the girl back to relative safety at the safe haven settlement known as Confederation.
He knows it’s not truly safe for the girl, because he knows an abused child when he sees one. It’s part of his programming. But after five years in the wasteland, Nanny also knows that the girl’s survival is at least possible there – and that it’s certainly not anywhere else at all.
But nothing is guaranteed, not even in a theoretically safe place – especially when both sides of the human/bot divide are hanging onto civilization and civility by their claws and fingernails, a torch just waiting to be lit.
While Nanny, and the girl he wants to protect every bit as much as the boy he once loved, are the match that too many beings on both sides have been waiting for. Because they’re ready to burn it all down – even if it kills them. And humanity along with them.
Escape Rating A-: If you’ve read Day Zero, this is an utter heartbreaker of a story. If you haven’t, it probably still lands as a post-apocalyptic, dystopian, Mad Max with sentient robots kind of nightmare, but you won’t have nearly as big an investment in the outcome.
Because IF you’ve read Day Zero, you KNOW who ‘Nanny’ is, even if he refuses to say it in the confines of his own head. And you don’t even blame him for his internal self-deception, because a human couldn’t cope with the loss any better – and possibly a whole lot worse.
The story here is the one down the complete and utter despair leg of the trousers of time from A Psalm for the Wild-Built. In this robot vs. human future, the sentients on both sides refuse to turn back from the brink that leads to the world of Service Model, and instead go screaming towards their own doom with furious glee.
Exhibiting all the worst behaviors of their kinds on the way down – because Confederation isn’t a haven or a refuge – it’s merely a waystation on the road to death and/or dismemberment and everyone there knows it. Even the nannybot who has arrived just in time to witness its final collapse.
This is absolutely NOT a happy book – although it absolutely is a compelling one. As a coda to Day Zero, it’s even sadder than its predecessor, but also, perhaps, just a bit wiser. Because it is also a story about finding one’s purpose again after a very long, grief-stricken, whole damn series of dark nights of the soul. A soul that this nannybot certainly has – even if he has to borrow it from his own past. A past in which he was just a tiger who loved a boy with every single bit of his mechanical heart.
