The Rest of the Robots (SF) - Isaac Asimov ***

Asimov's second collection of robot short stories is arguably a little better than I, Robot - apart from anything else it lacks the painfully unfunny bantering in the stories featuring the engineers Donovan and Powell in that earlier collection. Once again there are some clever problems set up - such as the failure of a robot to pilot a test flight of the first hyperdrive ship (giving the character who deactivates the ship some serious peril). But as before, these are stories of ideas that feel a little too cerebral and that have dated more than the novels seem to have done.

For me, far and above the best story was the final one in the collection, Galley Slave, which Asimov notes is his favourite Susan Calvin story - I'd agree. The actual setup of the story is very unlikely, but it's entertainingly set as a court case. What is particularly interesting is the parallel with the present agonies about generative AI such as ChatGPT in academia. The 'galley' of the story is not a ship, but the old style book proofs that ran down extra long pages and had wide margins in which to make obscure marks to indicate editorial changes.

In the story, a robot is provided to a university to do brainwork - one of its main capabilities is proof reading, which it does at high speed and accuracy. But the concern is inevitably that it will go beyond simply freeing up humans' time to rendering them redundant. It's interesting both from the real parallels with the future of generative AI, and also in exposing particularly well Asimov's blind spot that he felt such work had to be done by a robot rather than a computer (because inputting and outputting text would be too difficult). The idea that a humanoid robot would be easier to facilitate than text input and output is remarkable.

There are six Asimov robot titles in all, and it's very useful to get the robot prehistory from the stories to put the novels into context, though the full-length books do seem to read better. Reading them all in close proximity, it's interesting to see the inconsistencies in Asimov's robot storyline - particularly in the way that the short stories are largely set in the twenty-first century, while the novels leap forward thousands of years, despite there being very little advance in the computing technology (even the robots only advance slightly).

As with I, Robot, I was a touch disappointed, as I remembered (from many years ago) the short stories being rather better than they are - but I'm still glad to have come back to them.

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

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Search This Blog