"The Walls Have Eyes" by Clare B. Dunkle

Series summary: A boy and his dog, but they live in a dystopia and the dog is a shapeshifting robot |who's also the President|.

The boy and his shapeshifting robot dog go back to the dystopia to get his parents out of it. Said parents do not react well to leaving the dystopia. They set up rules, complain about not having all the modern dystopian conveniences, and generally annoy the main character. While this was the expected outcome, it still irritates me; I'd rather the parents had been some semblance of competent.

We also learn the reason for the robot dog's abnormally high security clearance: |He's the President|. Well, actually, he has |a special chip that makes him parrot robots' individual identification codes back to them during the "ok bot who are you" phase of robot communications, so they think he is them. He was ordered by the actual President, who's also| a robot, to |get rid of the Secretary of State (the sole human left in the government; everyone else is robots) so he stops making things dystopian|.

This book also answers the question I always have with non-worldwide dystopias: what's going on with the rest of the world? In this case, the U.S. (well, former U.S.) is basically |a giant testbed for various consumer products. The popular ones get produced by the robot factories and exported to the rest of the world|.

 

My brain keeps insisting that "The Walls Have Eyes" does not naturally follow after "The Sky Inside", and the order of the titles should be reversed. Speaking of which, the title refers to a bunch of spy cameras some government robots are setting up on people's walls. 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for threats of violence.

3 stars. Less cloney than the last one, but the parents bit leaves something to be desired.

Oh, and here's a picture of Mettaton NEO, Spamton NEO's counterpart from Undertale. He doesn't show up in the book, nor do I imagine anybody as him, but I had a picture of Spamton NEO last post so I decided I should complete the set.

Mettaton NEO.

(Endnote: Are you tired of using the same two senses to spy on your dystopian subjects? Walls with eyes and ears just not cutting it any more? Have we got the thing for you! Introducing the SpySniffer: the Nose Your Wall Could Smell With.)