I, Robot

by: Isaac Asimov

I love sci-fi, but criminally I had never read anything from Asimov since school when I read one of his short stories. Wow.

I saw the 2004 movie with Will Smith which was enjoyable enough though flawed in some areas, but I had no idea what the book was. The book is absolutely nothing like the film. It is much better.

Of course, it’s really not a novel and more a collection of interrelated short stories that are connected by a narrative of a young hungry journalist interviewing the “mother” of robotics, Robopsychologist Susan Calvin. The stories are interrelated in subject matter as well as through the appearances of a few main characters, such as Calvin, a field testing team of Mike Donovan (as a V fan, I loved that name) and Gregory Powell, Dr. Lanning who heads up US Robotics, and Stephen Byerley, a robot who eventually heads up the future planetary government.

It’s a very thought provoking tale with regards to different aspects of the human condition. Technophobia, morality, the human soul, the human socio-economic condition, the inevitably of human conflict. It’s all in there and discussed as a narrative tracing the rising of the robots in human culture from the first robot sold as a nanny all the way through to the robot who secretly became ruler of the world to save humanity.

Each individual story is excellent on it’s own grounds and yet the narrative works as a whole as only a master storyteller can accomplish. The characters are well drawn and he truly makes you think about how you will react personally and humanity as a society to the advancement of robots that think.

Asimov does a great job of not passing judgment either way, but instead providing intricate details about how thinking robots would possibly infer their commands from humans and let’s the reader decide for themeselves.

Overall it was a tremendous novel and well worth the short time it takes to read.

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