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The Robots of Dawn (SF) - Isaac Asimov ***

There is no doubt that The Robots of Dawn is fascinating from the point of view of being able to examine Isaac Asimov's development of a writer - and how he deals with technological dead ends in his first two Elijah Baley books from the 1950s when he revisited the character and his robotic challenges in 1983. Quite how well it works as a novel is a different matter, which we will return to.

In The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, Baley, a detective from the warren-like city of New York faces up to the societies of Spacers - humans who have settled on new planets and have totally different cultures to his own, notably in their enthusiastic use of robots. In this addition to the series, Baley travels to Aurora, the oldest of the Spacer planets, to try to solve an apparently intractable case of roboticide. A human-like robot (one of only two in existence) has been 'murdered'. But the only person who it's claimed could have done this denies having done so - and Earth's future rests on Baley being able to prove his innocence.

Once again Baley is teamed up with the (only remaining) fully humanoid robot, Daneel Olivaw. But in this book, Olivaw has hardly any part to play other than to act as a bodyguard for Baley - there is no real interplay between them, which is a shame. Faced also with the very 50s future technology of the first books, Asimov simply ploughs on with examples that can't be avoided, such as book films, and subtly changes others, such as the way computing had hardly moved on in 3,000 years.

There is no doubt that Asimov matured as a writer between the 50s and the 80s - but not always for the better. The first two novels had the intensity and immediacy that came from their magazine origins. Robots of Dawn is far more sprawling and suffers as a result. Any detective story is driven by conversations in a way that isn't necessary for every novel. It's a major part of how the detective uncovers details, and takes the reader into the process. But the conversations in this book are interminable, featuring pages of niggling discussion of unnecessary detail and roundabout wordiness. It gets distinctly dull.

The other way Asimov has moved on is to try to counter the accusation that his earlier books lacked human interaction by introducing sex and discussion of bodily functions that would never have made it before. This is helped by bringing back Gladia from The Naked Sun - probably Asimov's most rounded female character. There are still only two significant female characters in the novel, though. This all feels like the author is trying hard to do something he doesn't really like to do.

The other slight problem is that by this point, Asimov had hit on the idea of merging his robot stories and the Foundation series - this means that the ending of the book isn't so much about solving the crime as it is about lining things up for the introduction of psychohistory, which is unsatisfying. The book is more of a bridge than an entity in its own right.

This isn't a bad novel. It has some interesting ideas. Asimov sets up an impossible situation for Baley to solve, which he (sort of) does. But it isn't as enjoyable as the earlier robot novels. And it's even more obvious here that all the societies that Asimov describes here have bizarrely high levels of distortion from current human nature, where visitors from one society always react with horror to another culture, to the extent that every character (with the exception of Gladia) seems to have obsessive behaviour. It's frustrating because it could have been done so much better.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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