Rust & Ruin
A Journey Through the World's Abandoned Machines and the People Who Keep Them Alive
by Priscilla Vance
non-fiction
An unforgettable journey through the world's abandoned machines and the people who love them, revealing what our discarded technology says about us.
About this book
In Rust & Ruin, we cross the globe to meet the machines we left behind—the spacecraft still orbiting Mars, the factory floors once roaring with industry, the ships stranded in harbors by wars that ended decades ago. These relics are not just objects; they are repositories of sweat, ambition, and memory, holding within their decaying frames the echoes of entire lifetimes and civilizations.
From the deserts of Kazakhstan, where Soviet lunar rovers now lie in silent homage to a space race that never saw them triumph, to the living-room museums of Dutch engineers who hoard vacuum tubes and cathode-ray sets, we meet the people who refuse to let these machines vanish. Each chapter is a portrait of a different relationship to obsolescence—a Cuban mechanic keeping 1950s Chryslers alive past the apocalypse of the Soviet Union, a Brazilian librarian preserving a steam locomotive in perpetual readiness, a German archivist cataloging every failed gear in a disused wind farm.
This is not a book about technology, but about what it means to be human in a world we are perpetually building and abandoning. It asks: What do we owe the objects we create? And what does our willingness to let them go—or our desperate clinging to them—say about how we face our own inevitable obsolescence? Through over a decade of travel and research, we uncover a story of loss and renewal, of entropy and resistance.
Rust & Ruin is a meditation on time, memory, and the strange beauty of things that no longer serve us, but still speak. It will change the way you see the ailing car in your drive, the ghost on your screen, and the broken machines in your own heart.
Reader Reviews
Margaret Martinez
★★★★★This book wrecked me in the best way. I read the opening chapter about that Utah rover and had to put the book down just to breathe. It's not really about machines—it's about every dream we've ever abandoned, and the people who still tend to those dreams. The prose is gorgeous, the research is staggering, and I'll never look at my old toaster the same way. Please read this.
Deborah Hall
★★★★★I picked this up thinking it would be a quirky travelogue about old junk. Instead, it's a profound meditation on mortality and memory. The chapter on the Cuban mechanic keeping those Chryslers alive genuinely made me cry. Every page feels like a love letter to everything we've ever made and lost. It's been a month, and I still think about that lunar rover's wheels caked with moon dust. Unforgettable.
Michael Robinson
★★★★★As an engineer, I've spent my life building things that will eventually be obsolete. This book gave me a new way to see my own work—and the work of everyone around me. The author's decade of travel shows in every detail, from the German wind farm archivist to the Brazilian librarian. The writing is poetic but never pretentious. I've already bought three copies to give to my colleagues. A masterpiece.
Rebecca Green
★★★★★I'm usually skeptical of books that promise to 'change how you see the world,' but this one actually did. The opening scene in the Utah desert, with that forgotten rover, set the tone perfectly. The author has a gift for finding the human story in rust and silence. I loved the way each chapter felt like a small, perfect short story. I'll be recommending this to everyone I know who's ever felt left behind by time.
Michael Martinez
★★★★★There's a lot to admire here—the prose is lovely, and I appreciated the global scope, especially the chapters on the Soviet rovers and the Dutch vacuum-tube hoarders. But I found the book uneven. Some sections felt more like a poetic essay than a documented journey, and I wanted more hard facts, dates, and interviews. Also, the opening chapter is beautiful but slow; it took me a while to get into the rhythm. If you like lyrical nonfiction, you'll enjoy it. If you prefer investigative rigor, you might feel a bit unsatisfied.