"Sunker's Deep" by Lian Tanner

In this universe, a bunch of angry uber-Luddites took over the world, then 300 years passed. When the angry uber-Luddites were taking over, some scientists decided that the best way to preserve the knowledge of the world was to make a bunch of giant submarines and put a bunch of people on them. Also there's this giant icebreaker that sails around breaking ice. It contains a robot dude.

(The icebreaker was never actually really explained in this book, due to this one being the second in a trilogy.)

 

The angry uber-Luddites, predictably, made the world dystopian, especially once they turned themselves into a pseudo-religious dictatorship reminiscent of the Khmer Rouge and forcibly regressed the world back to the medieval ages. (Which, by the way, is a terrible idea. The reason the world can support 8 billion people is because of things like chemical fertilizers, cargo ships, and railroads. Not to mention they also presumably got rid of stuff like air conditioning and radio.)

Nobody in this book really knows what they're doing. The robot dude (who was apparently the MacGuffin of the previous book) is trying to find something that was poorly programmed into him by his creators, who were the same people that made the giant submarines and the giant icebreaker.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence and mild blood.

4 stars.

 

(Endnote: If only they'd thought to build a giant overpowered battleship as well. Or hide a bunch of heavily-armed robots instead of just one lightly-armed robot. The thing about uber-Luddites regressing the world to medieval times is that they don't really have the resources to fight modern technology.)