Perhaps the world ended, and we brought it on ourselves. But only Joyce noticed the whimper. And she might just be tits-out crazy.Along with smarmy Sam, life's impossible tourist, a trucker's death draws Joyce down the last highway into the desert's beating heart. And at the Judgment Day Diner they will be caught up in a maelstrom of adultery, lies and hidden violence.Intended for adult readers, science fiction/humour novel Automatons is a stripping bare of the ways people stumble blindly down the same old paths, and how we find it so much easier to be humane to our technology rather than each other.The raw legacy laid down is continued in Book Two: Something for Everything.