Everything you need to understand or teach Great Sky River by Gregory Benford.
Great Sky River takes place in the same universe as In the Ocean of Night (1978), Across the Sea of Suns (1984), and other novels in the Nigel Walmsley series, but at a time much farther into the future. Humanity long ago succeeded in establishing a galaxy-spanning civilization. On the planet Snowglade, for example, there was a golden age during which human beings drastically altered their own bodies through cybernetic improvements and DNA restructuring. That near-utopian period ended, however, due to the onslaught of the Mechs, a robot civilization descended, perhaps, from the robotic intelligences of Walmsley's day. Now humanity is nearly extinct, its few remnants, although still superhuman in terms of their physical capabilities, caught up in a hopeless, nomadic lifestyle. On the run from the Mechs who now control Snowglade, the remaining human families are little more than vermin, nibbling at the edges of...