Wednesday, 31 December 2014 03:00 pm
Book Review: Robot Visions
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deckardcanineThis collection was first printed in 1991, shortly before Isaac Asimov's death. The cover on my edition claims 36 stories and essays, but I keep counting 35 in the table of contents. Anyway, I had read six of the stories before, leaving me with mixed feelings: less new stuff to enjoy, but less time needed to get thru it all.
While I did not get the rush of elation that I, Robot gave me, it felt good to return to the environs of exploring the implications of the Three Laws of Robotics. This time I compulsively shared details of several stories with my mom, who could see why I was intrigued. In truth, I doubt we can ever program real robots with such nuances, and other writers have addressed related predicaments that Asimov apparently didn't, but to think that he started his revolutionary work at age 19 and made his biggest impact with three sentences at 21!
The stories range from 7 to 46 pages in this paperback and, in my estimation, from excellent to OK. Even the lamest has something to offer. "Someday," for instance, doesn't really have a complete plot and asks us to accept that a luxurious future has basically relegated literacy to museums (I for one wouldn't prefer to have these stories spoken aloud to me), but the ending is delectably creepy.
My personal favorites? Well, "Robot Visions," the same-title opening story, brings an interesting twist to the folly of time travel. "Liar!" shows more of recurring robopsychologist Susan Calvin's human side than ever before or since. "Evidence," while not entirely thought out (or at least the thoughts aren't entirely spelled out), gets the gears turning. "Little Robot Lost" marks probably the first Asimov story with a halfway antagonistic bot, which still cleverly avoids the age-old cliche of a mechanical slave uprising. "Feminine Intuition" cuts sexist scientists down to size. "The Bicentennial Man," rather simple despite its length, is so poignant that I'm not surprised Chris Columbus directed an indirect film adaptation thereof. "Mirror Image" finally uses Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw in a short mystery. "Lenny" shows Dr. Calvin at her kindest and a robot at its cutest. "Galley Slave" touches me somewhat personally, as the central robot's proofreading and editing threatens to put a human out of a job. And "Christmas Without Rodney" has one of the few first-person narrators -- and easily the most amusing, in a sardonic fashion.
Then there are the essays, which repeat enough that you can tell they weren't all written with compilation in mind. I considered skipping them altogether, but they come in mercifully smaller chunks of 3 to 12 pages (not counting the highly informative introduction for this collection) and show a similar level of thoughtfulness regarding machines, whether in reference to his own stories or not. They are also more blatantly opinionated, for better or worse. Would you agree that robots taking over all our non-artistic work would be good? How about robots replacing humans altogether?
Of all the essays, I may have taken the most interest in "The Sense of Humor," in which Asimov posits that robots would envy nothing in humans more than our sense of humor, but humans would not care to give them one. His imagined dialogs of failed attempts to explain jokes to bots are pretty funny in their own right. Unfortunately, the examples he uses reflect a sense of humor almost as foreign to me as to a robot. I sure won't seek out his published joke books.
I will definitely continue to dig into Asimov. Maybe I'll even take a chance on another Foundation volume when I run out of robot novels.
In the meantime, I'll start on Julia Stuart's The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise (published in its UK homeland as Balthazar Jones and the Tower of London Zoo). Mom's been recommending it for a while, and it sounds quirky.
While I did not get the rush of elation that I, Robot gave me, it felt good to return to the environs of exploring the implications of the Three Laws of Robotics. This time I compulsively shared details of several stories with my mom, who could see why I was intrigued. In truth, I doubt we can ever program real robots with such nuances, and other writers have addressed related predicaments that Asimov apparently didn't, but to think that he started his revolutionary work at age 19 and made his biggest impact with three sentences at 21!
The stories range from 7 to 46 pages in this paperback and, in my estimation, from excellent to OK. Even the lamest has something to offer. "Someday," for instance, doesn't really have a complete plot and asks us to accept that a luxurious future has basically relegated literacy to museums (I for one wouldn't prefer to have these stories spoken aloud to me), but the ending is delectably creepy.
My personal favorites? Well, "Robot Visions," the same-title opening story, brings an interesting twist to the folly of time travel. "Liar!" shows more of recurring robopsychologist Susan Calvin's human side than ever before or since. "Evidence," while not entirely thought out (or at least the thoughts aren't entirely spelled out), gets the gears turning. "Little Robot Lost" marks probably the first Asimov story with a halfway antagonistic bot, which still cleverly avoids the age-old cliche of a mechanical slave uprising. "Feminine Intuition" cuts sexist scientists down to size. "The Bicentennial Man," rather simple despite its length, is so poignant that I'm not surprised Chris Columbus directed an indirect film adaptation thereof. "Mirror Image" finally uses Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw in a short mystery. "Lenny" shows Dr. Calvin at her kindest and a robot at its cutest. "Galley Slave" touches me somewhat personally, as the central robot's proofreading and editing threatens to put a human out of a job. And "Christmas Without Rodney" has one of the few first-person narrators -- and easily the most amusing, in a sardonic fashion.
Then there are the essays, which repeat enough that you can tell they weren't all written with compilation in mind. I considered skipping them altogether, but they come in mercifully smaller chunks of 3 to 12 pages (not counting the highly informative introduction for this collection) and show a similar level of thoughtfulness regarding machines, whether in reference to his own stories or not. They are also more blatantly opinionated, for better or worse. Would you agree that robots taking over all our non-artistic work would be good? How about robots replacing humans altogether?
Of all the essays, I may have taken the most interest in "The Sense of Humor," in which Asimov posits that robots would envy nothing in humans more than our sense of humor, but humans would not care to give them one. His imagined dialogs of failed attempts to explain jokes to bots are pretty funny in their own right. Unfortunately, the examples he uses reflect a sense of humor almost as foreign to me as to a robot. I sure won't seek out his published joke books.
I will definitely continue to dig into Asimov. Maybe I'll even take a chance on another Foundation volume when I run out of robot novels.
In the meantime, I'll start on Julia Stuart's The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise (published in its UK homeland as Balthazar Jones and the Tower of London Zoo). Mom's been recommending it for a while, and it sounds quirky.