Robots and Empire (SF) - Isaac Asimov ****

In the last of his six robot books (though at least one character from here would appear in the late additions to the Foundation series), Isaac Asimov gives us a far more substantial threat than the roboticide central to his other late robot title The Robots of Dawn.There's a double menace with both the need to uncover a plot against Earth and the mysterious disappearance of the inhabitants of Solaria (though the latter will be left to a later book to sort out).

Because of this, Robots and Empire reads better than Robots of Dawn, though it suffers from the same problem of spending far too long over conversations with logical arguments dragged out for page after page, and ludicrously verbose explanations. Here, a character will say they know what has happened (or whatever) and then take five pages before they reveal what they think. It feels like famous author syndrome in action - Asimov’s editor should have been far firmer.

Although the book follows on from the three books featuring Elijah Baley and Daneel Olivaw as an unlikely detective duo, Baley is long dead, so the human continuity comes in via Gladia, who Baley first met on Solaria, and a distant descendent of Baley from one of the frontier worlds settled from Earth (subtly called Baleyworld).

There is no doubt that the two robot novels from the 50s work much better than those from the 80s, but because more happens here, and there is more of a high concept threat, this book still pulls together the robot series relatively well - the later novels would be more focused on the developments from the Foundation series with less significance given to the robot thread (and, sadly, no crime fiction crossover).

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 Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here. We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...

Search This Blog