I, Robot (SF) - Isaac Asimov ***

Without doubt, I, Robot is a classic of science fiction. Dating back to 1950 it collects Asimov's early short stories about robots in the shared setting of the US Robots and Mechanical Men corporation, mostly featuring robopsychologist Susan Calvin.

I read these stories many years ago, but have only recently re-aquired them when I bought The Caves of Steel in a six book package. There's some clever work here, with almost all the stories featuring Asimov's famous 'three laws of robotics' and specifically exploring ways that the robots interpret these 'laws' resulting in things going wrong. It's still an interesting read - but I don't think it has stood the test of time as well as The Caves of Steel.

Don't get me wrong - it's still an essential part of the SF canon, and even the collective title is iconic (the stories originally appeared in magazines, of course). But Asimov's limitations with characterisation come through more strongly here. Several of the stories feature a pair of robotic engineers, Donovan and Powell, whose interminable banter I assume is supposed to be amusing, but in reality is extremely irritating. The only significant female character is Calvin, who is a caricature of an emotionless scientist.

To make matters worse, there are the timescales involved. In The Caves of Steel, we have a kind of reverse anachronism where they still use 1950s IT (and smoke pipes) three thousand years in the future - for some reason, this is just charming. But in I Robot there are humanoid robot nursemaids by the 1990s (their only limitation being they can't talk) and pretty much perfect robots a decade or two later (by which time we are routinely sending people to locations as far reaching as Mercury and the asteroids, and a starship drive is well under way). This somehow feels significantly worse.

Two or three of the stories here are excellent - and any not featuring the humorous pairing are good (to be fair, even in those the problems faced are excellent). But this is very much an exercise in setting up hard robotic psychology problems and finding a solution, with little consideration given to an effective narrative. I'm glad I read it again, but I'm not sure if I'd bother to re-read it in the future.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Six book package:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life. To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier. It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...

Search This Blog