Skip to main content

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

Popular posts from this blog

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that â€˜Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...