The Positronic Man

The Positronic Man
© 1993 Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg
290 pages

This novel takes me back to high school, where at some point following the release of The Bicentennial Man starring Robin Williams, I checked it out and read my very first Asimov. I'd watched enough Star Trek to know that 'positronic' meant that this was about an android, and thought perhaps the movie was based on it. My guess was right: The Positronic Man is an expansion of Asimov's short story, "The Bicentennial Man", just as Nightfall is an Asimov-Silverberg expansion of "Nightfall".  The tale of Andrew Martin, the robot who wanted to become a man, is one of my favorite Asimov stories. Data from The Next Generation may have predisposed  me to being fascinated with the book's theme -- what does it mean to be a human, to be sentient?

After having read Silverberg and Asimov's expansion of "Nightfall", I cannot read the original story without missing the additional content. It seems like only half a story. The Positronic Man is more conservative on that count,  starting and ending at the same points as Asimov's original story. That can scarcely be avoided, as much of the original story took place in the form of a flashback, as Andrew -- preparing for a surgery that will constitute the 'final' leap and give him either the humanity he desires or the welcome release of death -- recounts how he came to be such an usual creature, the being who is far more a robot and yet, not quite a man. The Positronic Man greatly enriches the experience; events which are summarized in a sentence or two in the original story unfold over the course of a chapter, allowing for a great deal more characterization, both on Andrew's part and his human companions This isn't simply a 'lengthier' version of " Bicentennial  Man": the additions, which flow so well from the original text, allow Andrew to truly evolve throughout the course of the book: he matures before our eyes as a character, not just as a robot who abandons metal coverings for pseudo-skin or gains legal standing. The polite, metallic servant introduced in the first chapter slowly grows into a thoughtful man, accomplished in multiple artistic and intellectual fields, driven by the same impulses that motivate us all.

I enjoyed this work tremendously;  while I don't know how much is Silverberg and how much is Asimov's, the result makes my favorite Asimov story even better.

Isaac Asimov's Caliban

Isaac Asimov's Caliban: A New Robot Novel
© 1993 Roger MacBride Allen
312 pages

The planet Inferno is slipping toward ecological disaster, and the only woman with the wisdom to save it has just been attacked and left lying in a pool of her own blood -- a pool disturbed by the tracks of robot feet,  tracks which lead outside to the capital city of Hades. The galaxy's first lawless robot, built without the safeguards of the Three Laws of Robotics, has been set loose on the city -- and there will be hell to pay.

Caliban is a three-threaded story: as Sheriff Kresh attempts to solve the case of this near-murder, the victim struggles to heal and resume her work of preparing Inferno to save itself from a permanent ice age,  and the lawless robot Caliban wanders through the city leaving a path of mayhem behind him. Caliban knows virtually nothing of robots, humans, and the relationship between then -- he must learn how to navigate the world on his own,  through the direct accumulation of experience.  The stories of all three persons merge in the end, and though it's a fitting end it still makes me itch to read the rest of this trilogy.

I did not purposely buy this book: when, two summers ago, I bought a box of Asimov books on eBay which contained the Foundation novels,  Caliban came with them. It has sat in my Asimov bookcase since,  but a few nights ago I decided to give it a try. Despite my starting off as a hostile reader ("'Isaac Asimov's Caliban? 'Where does he get off, using Asimov's name to draw in readers?!"), MacBride quickly won me over. Although the state of technology in 1993 creates a marked difference between MacBride's humans and Asimov's (Caliban has people using cellphones, and the robots functioning with HUDs), the central themes are definitely in line with what Asimov might have written. The societal consequences of over-reliance on robots is a source of conflict between the Spacers and Settlers -- who, together, are attempting to save the planet's status as a viable place for humans to live -- and motivation for the lead scientist whose battered head  introduced the story.  Caliban also takes on the Three Laws of Robotics, which Asimov invented in reaction to the early-SF use of robots as monstrous beings: he perceived robots as human-made tools, which would naturally have safeguards.  In Caliban, the use of those Laws -- a mainstay in all of Asimov's robot stories and novels -- is reevaluated while Caliban leads the Sheriff in a wild chase. The drama lasts until the last pages, ending on a high note and whetting my appetite for more.

Robots and Empire

Robots and Empire
© 1985 Isaac Asimov
383 pages

In Isaac Asimov's robots novels, Earth is home to some eight billion people living in vast underground complexes known as Cities or "caves of steel". In his Empire novels, those billions have vanished: large patches of land are radioactive, and the few who remain hold on bitterly to memories of Earth's past glory.  How did Earth fall from being the heart of humanity to passing out of memory entirely in the Foundation series? Its decline, and the rise of the Galactic Empire, begin in Robots and Empire -- a fantastic novel which uses a plot of political mystery to seamlessly knit together Asimov's series.

Two hundred years have passed since famed Earth detective Elijah Baley died, but his legacy is strong and growing. Baley helped the people of Earth to look again to space, to build civilizations away from the tired old Earth from which they sprang.  Humans had looked outward before, settling some fifty planets, but the people there used robot labor to create lives of leisure for themselves. They ceased to grow, to expand -- and they regarded their less-advanced Earth ancestors with disdain.  It was their power and Earth's fear of change that Baley defeated with the help of others, but now both Baley and his allies are dead.  There are those among the "Spacers" who do not want to see Earth expand again...and they will strike at the planet itself if that is what it takes. They work their plans in secret, but Baley's old partner R. Daneel Olivaw is determined to thwart their plans.

Robots and Empire functions as both an SF political thriller and a  bridge between Asimov's series. He's written other books to serve the same function, and together they tell a story which lasts for thousands of years. Although there are still some loose threads (What happened to the Cities during the Empire novels?), Robots and Empire reveals how Earth decayed and why robots (present in Robots, absent in both the original Empire and Foundation novels)  fell from use. His central character here, and consequently the Robots-Empire-Foundation meta series, is the robot Daneel Olivaw, who is driven by a vision from his friend and partner Elijah Baley that will see its final fruit in the last Foundation books. Still, Robots and Empire is more solidly a Robots novel, featuring Elijah Baley (in flashbacks) and his other associates, the Solarian woman Gladia and a telepathic robot named Giskard, who has his own role to play. It reminds me much of Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation, both in style and in the measure that I enjoyed it.

This is an obvious recommendation to anyone who has enjoyed Asimov's various series. While having read the rest of the books isn't a requirement, catching the multitude of little references added to my appreciation. I would suggest reading the Robots novels (The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn) first, since the relationship, history, and culture differences between Earth and the Spacer worlds provide the central conflict here. 

The Complete Robot

The Complete Robot
© 1982 Isaac Asimov
688 pages

A boom in electronic engineering followed World War 2, one that led to consumer televisions, the first computers, and a wide variety of other electricity-using gadgets. As people looked more toward the future, they conceived of mechanical men: these robots often ran amok in the style of Frankenstein's monster. Isaac Asimov thought this silly: robots were tools explicitly designed by intelligent people. It made no sense for them to run amok. He subsequently developed in full the Three Laws of Robotics, and later wrote a host of stories and novels based on them.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov used his stories to explore how humans might use robots to better the human condition, but he also explored questions of intelligence, creativity, sentience, and prejudice. He coined the phrase robotics and his body of work subsequently left various marks on our culture: the android Lieutenant Commander Data of Star Trek possesses one of Asimov's "positronic brains", for instance. The Complete Robot collects just over thirty of his short stories in this theme, written throughout the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Because other robot stories and essays followed it, its name has not remained accurate: still, the book constitutes the sizable bulk of his robot short fiction, including the Susan Calvin stories and classics like "Robbie".

The stories vary slightly in setting, but cover the latter half of the 20th century and human history throughout the 21st, until the dawn of hyperdrives that allow for interstellar travel. Most of the stories share a same canon: at some point in the late 20th or early 21st century,  the many political entities on Earth unite under a weak confederation. Essential parts of the economic (agriculture, for instance) are planned, and crucial to the planning are large computers. These globe-monitoring computing machines in the style of UNIVAC may be subsidiaries to Multivac -- a massive supercomputer at least the size of a building. Several stories here concern Multivac, the machine that bears all the cares of humanity upon its transistor- and vacuum-tube employing shoulders.

Robots in the style of Commander Data come later: while designed to emulate human beings in essential form and size, they exist chiefly for industrial work or for the amusement of wealthy individuals. The people of Earth later react against the employment of robots in this way, relegating them to maintaining space posts in a dozen or so of the stories here. Three stories follow Mike Donovan and Gregory Powell, two quality-assurance technicians in the employ of US Robots and Mechanical Men, as they observe the latest robot models at work, "manning" the stations that beam intense sunlight to Earth, powering its electric grid. Later on, robots nearly vanish from Earth history altogether: in the Empire age, only humans who have left Earth to colonize other worlds use robots. Little of the Empire age is seen here, though -- only its prelude in a short story about detectives Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw, the latter being what we call today an android.

Asimov's stories are as ever simple and charming. They bear the mark of the fifties and sixties, not only in their portrayal of marriage (husband goes to work, wife keeps house), but in the way they grapple with the future. Some predictions seem banal by modern standards, others still far off and bordering on fantastic -- but the optimism and hope are undeniable. Asimov is refreshing and endearing, and the retro-feel has its own appeal to me. The Complete Robot is a solid hit, taking me back to that summer in which I first delighted in Asimov's short stories. I definitely recommend it.

Highlights:

• "Sally", a favorite of mine about automated cars with personalities.
• "True Love", in which a computer designed to find its maker the perfect match finds his own.
• "The Tercentenary Incident", set on 4 July 2076, follows the aftermath of an attempted assassination of the US President. The assassins seemed to have only vaporized the president's android decoy -- but who can know that that puff of atoms following the disintegration blast belonged to an android, and not to an unpopular president?
• "Reason", in which quality-assurance technicians struggle with the first sentient robot after it establishes a religion based on the worshiping the station which it was designed to serve. 
• "Mirror Image", an unexpected treat featuring the Robots trilogy team of Elijah Baley and Daneel Olivaw as they attempt to settle a matter of academic fraud.
• "The Bicentennial Man" follows a robot's quest for humanity. Watching the Robin Williams movie of this prompted me to read The Positronic Man back in high school, my first involvement with Asimov. The link leads to the trailer.

"To those of you who have read some (or, possibly, all) of my robot stories before, I welcome your loyalty and patience. To those of you who have not, I hope this book has given you pleasure -- and I'm pleased to have met you -- and I hope we meet again soon." - p. 683, 'the last word'.

Indeed, Dr. A.

The Robots of Dawn

The Robots of Dawn
© 1983 Isaac Asimov
419 pages

I return to Asimov's Robots series with the third mystery novel featuring plainclothesman Elijah Baley. Having established a reputation on Earth and elsewhere in the galaxy for his ability to adjust to new situations and earn the trust of "Spacers", or humans who have lived on other words long enough to develop their own cultures on their various worlds, Baley is asked to travel to Aurora to investigate a case of robotocide. While en route, Baley is delighted to see his old crime-solving partner Daneel Olivaw -- an android who was made to look and act human. Daneel is one of a kind, because as we will soon learn, the only other android has been rendered inoperative -- and it is that crime which Baley has been called to invesitigate.

Baley and Daneel land in Aurora -- the planet of the "dawn", hence the name -- where Baley learns that this case is more complicated than he had imagined. To render a robot inoperative is not a crime, particularly since its owner is the only man with the knowledge and skill sufficient to destroy the robot in the way it was destroyed -- but that man, Dr. Han Fastolfe, is Earth's lone champion on Aurora, the greatest of the Spacer worlds. The fifty "Spacer" worlds are all more technologically advanced than Earth, as Earth's resources are tied in maintaining its massive population. Technological advances are also actively suppressed by the Spacers, who do not want Earth to begin colonizing space anew and saturating the galaxy with its aggressive and primitive billions. If Fastolfe is implicated in any legal embarrassment, his political opponents can use that to quiet him down and thus maintain Aurora's policy of restraining Earth. Fastolfe insists that he didn't do it, forcing Baley to interview both humans and robots in an effort to discern the truth.

Asimov maintains his "unadorned" style and smoothly incorporates information from his Robot stories ("Liar!" and "The Bicentennial Man") into the plot of his book, having his characters treat them as legends of the past. The Robots of Dawn seems to rely on more characters than The Naked Sun or Caves of Steel. Although this is a perfectly enjoyably mystery novel, what I find most interesting is Asimov's replication of culture, particularly cultural taboos. Robots of Dawn was as enjoyable as ever, although I think I still prefer The Caves of Steel at this point. I'm interested in reading the final Robots book, Robots and Empire, but don't have access to it presently.

The Naked Sun

The Naked Sun
© Asimov 1957
187 pages

A note to readers: I have been avoiding reading science fiction because I don't like it rivaling my history reading. Being in Selma gave me access to The Naked Sun, though, and so I seized the opportunity. The Naked Sun is the second in Asimov's "Robot" series. In this novel's preceding work, The Caves of the Steel, we readers were introduced to detective Elijah Baley and his robot partner R. Daneel Olivaw. We were also introduced to the universe that Baley lives in. Fifty or so planets have been colonized by Earth, although these "Spacer" worlds have quickly surpassed Earth in technological prowess and have been engaged in a policy of keeping Earth down. The Spacer worlds are lightly populated by our standards or anyone else's. The Spacers have cleaned themselves of Earth's germs and want little to do with Earth people. When one of their number is murdered, however, they have no choice but to resort to Elijah Baley, who in The Caves of Steel helped solved the murder of a Spacer on Earth.

Baley and his partner Olivaw travel to Solaria, a very sparsely populated world where the inhabitants are very keen on their privacy. They have intimacy taboos and are never in the company of other humans in their adult life, save for the occasional visitation by a spouse. They do their visiting through what amount to holographic images. Given their intense taboo against being in the company of another, and given that robots in Asimov's universe cannot kill a human being (given the Three Laws of Robotics), Baley has quite a problem. If the humans couldn't do it, and the robots couldn't do it,....whodunit?

The novel is excellently written. I was able to derive the solution by myself, but that's probably thanks to the volume of Asimov I've read. As usual, very enjoyable.

The Caves of Steel

The Caves of Steel
© Isaac Asimov 1953

I finally found a copy of The Caves of Steel this week. I’ve been looking for this book since the beginning of November, but my libraries have been unable to procure a copy that isn’t lost. The Caves of Steel is a detective story set in the future -- roughly around the 23rd century. Earth’s cities have become “Cities”: enclosed structures where people are not exposed to the open here. People move from place to place through moving “strips” -- a la Jetsons ? -- and no longer live and eat as separate families. Suburban sprawl has been replaced by sectional “boxes”. Each sectional building is divided into sections, and each section has apartments for families to live in. These apartments do not include kitchens, laundry room, or bathrooms, though -- those are all communal.

The main character is a man named Elijah Baley, a plainclothes detective working for the City government. His City is New York, and it is now the second-biggest city in the world, the first being Los Angeles. Baley is tasked with finding out who killed a Spacer sociologist. A Spacer is a resident of one of the fifty Spacer worlds -- fifty worlds settled by Earth with very little population density. The Spacers have created for themselves “C/Fe Societies”, wherein humans (carbon-based) and robots (iron-based) work together. The Earthers, being conservative, are very much opposed to robots, and such is the environment that Baley has been raised in.

When Baley is asked to solve this murder, he is also asked to take on a robot partner. We would call this partner an android, for he looks like a human and has been programmed to mimic human behavior. Baley is at first aghast at the prospect of working with his new partner -- R. Daneel Olivaw -- but grows accustomed to him by book’s end. The book is the story of their efforts to find the murderer. Asimov’s writing seems to be even better than I’m used to, but anticipation may have heightened my enjoyment. I enjoyed learning about the world he created, and I think he did a good job. He thinks about the impact living in these apartment-boxes has on people, including taboos and so on. I found the book to be excellent reading, and I will enjoy reading more in the series.

Robot Dreams

Robot Dreams
Isaac Asimov © 1986
Berkely Publishing, NY
349 pages

When I first started reading Asimov's fiction, I started with short story collections -- and this week I returned to that type of literature. Robot Dreams is a collection of short stories that deal with robots or computers. Some of these stories have appeared in collections I've read in weeks past, and so I re-read them -- and enjoyed them again, as much as I did the first time I read them. Asimov begins the book with an introduction, and it is his introductions and commentaries that first made me such a fan of him.

Although the collection is titled "Robot Dreams", the stories in the collection don't all have robots. Many of them are about the role of computers -- which for Asimov, writing in the forties and fifties, was real science fiction. A few of his stories feature Multivac, which is a character by itself. Multivac is always depicted as a massive computer that coordinates all of the other computers on the planet -- Asimov never predicted personal computers (although he did predict hand-held computers and personal consoles that could access the "real" computers). In Asimov's stories, computers are industrial and government tools, each section having a part of the globe to handle its problems. Asimov also depicts computers building better computers, to the extent that humanity forgets how to and becomes as dependent on the computers as -- well, there's no real anagram, I don't think.

A few stories from the collection, with comments:

• "The Feeling of Power" is one of my favorites. People have completely forgotten how to do ordinary math, so dependent on computers are they. Earth is at war with the planet Deneb, which is similarly addicted to computers and is probably settled by humans. Then a lowly technician realizes he can do math in his head, which has implications for the war effort.
• "Little Lost Robot" deals with robots at a hyperstation. It features Susan Calvin, Asimov's first female and one of his most memorable characters. One robot with a superiority complex is told to "get lost" and promptly does so -- compromising the security of Earth's hyperspace program and possibly the future of robotics.
  
• In "Robot Dreams", an experimental robot brain leads to a robot that have subconscious thoughts and dream about them -- but its subconscious thoughts of those of it freeing robots from human servitude.
• "Lest We Remember" is the story of a man whose life is changed when he takes part of a medical trial designed to increase the ability to recall stored memories -- and who learns that an infallible memory doesn't necessarily make one wise.
• "The Ugly Little Boy" is always mentioned by Asimov as one of his personal favorites. I find it enjoyable, but it's not a favorite of mine. Still, I mention it because he likes it so much. The story is about a Neanderthal boy who is ripped from time and brought to Earth to be studied.
• "Franchise" is one of the more interesting stories, because it predicts the importance of voting machines. Asimov wrote this in 1955, remember. In Asimov's future -- in our reality, November 2008 -- Multivac has come to control the elections by analyzing data and coming to a rational prediction about who the elecorate would vote for -- if they were in fact to vote. So complex has Multivac become by 2008 that it only needs to ask a few questions of one voter to come to its decision. This voter is apparantly chosen by Multivac to be the most represenative of all his citizens. He is informed thusly: "Mr. Norman Muller, it is necessary for me to inform you on the behalf of the President of the United States that you have been chosen to represent the American elecorate on Tuesday, November 4, 2008". Considering the week I happened to read this in, you can imagine what I found so interesting about it.
  

I enjoyed almost every story, even those I have read before. There are a couple of shorter stories that I didn't quite "get", but they were vastly outnumbered by the interesting ones. I enjoyed the collection immensely and reccommend it.