Jason Pettus's Reviews > I, Robot

THE‌ ‌GREAT‌ ‌COMPLETIST‌ ‌CHALLENGE:‌ ‌In‌ ‌which‌ ‌I‌ ‌revisit‌ ‌older‌ ‌authors‌ ‌and‌ ‌attempt‌ ‌to‌ ‌read‌ every‌ ‌book‌ ‌they‌ ‌ever‌ ‌wrote‌

Currently‌ ‌in‌ ‌the‌ ‌challenge:‌ ‌Margaret‌ Atwood‌ |‌ ‌JG‌ ‌Ballard‌ |‌ Clive‌ ‌Barker‌ |‌ Christopher‌ Buckley‌ |‌ ‌Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | ‌Lee Child's Jack Reacher | ‌Philip‌ ‌K‌ ‌Dick‌ |‌ ‌Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William‌ ‌Gibson‌ |‌ ‌Michel‌ Houellebecq‌ |‌ John‌ ‌Irving‌ |‌ ‌Kazuo‌ ‌Ishiguro‌ |‌ Shirley‌ Jackson‌ | ‌John‌ ‌Le‌ ‌Carre‌ |‌ Bernard‌ ‌Malamud‌ |‌ Cormac McCarthy | China‌ ‌Mieville‌ |‌ Toni Morrison | ‌VS‌ Naipaul‌ |‌ Chuck‌ ‌Palahniuk‌ |‌ ‌Tim‌ ‌Powers‌ |‌ ‌Terry‌ ‌Pratchett's‌ ‌Discworld‌ |‌ Philip‌ ‌Roth‌ |‌ Neal‌ Stephenson‌ |‌ ‌Jim‌ ‌Thompson‌ |‌ John‌ ‌Updike‌ |‌ Kurt‌ ‌Vonnegut‌ |‌ Jeanette Winterson | PG‌ ‌Wodehouse‌ ‌

Finished: ‌Isaac‌ ‌Asimov's‌ ‌"Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation‌)


Eek, I just realized I never actually wrote my reviews of the first two books in this series! Oh well, I guess I need to do so here, then post this extra-long review to all three book pages...

For those who don't know, Isaac Asimov first got famous in the 1950s from three different novel series that at first seemed to have nothing to do with each other: the "Robot" novels, set in a moderately near future in which humans are first colonizing the galaxy, using an explosion of robots for the task and not quite sure how to think about it; the "Empire" novels, set of thousands of years later, in which a now scattered humanity has coalesced into a single galaxial empire full of intrigue (one of the first book series to inspire the term "space opera"); and the "Foundation" novels, set thousands of years after that, in which a brilliant math-based sociologist comes to realize that this galaxial empire is about to crumble, and sets secret plans in motion to ensure that humanity survives and is able to re-organize afterwards. Each of these series originally had three books in them apiece (plus a book of day-after-tomorrow "Robot" short stories), which is how it remained for decades; but then in the 1980s, as Asimov neared the end of his life, he realized that with a few well-placed bridging novels he could actually link these ten books into one coherent and pervasive 10,000-year history of the human race, which is what prompted him to crank out another five novels that decade to now expand this "mega-series" into 15 books*.

[*This is not counting the three "Inferno" robot novels from the 1990s, which Asimov had been sketching out as his next project before dying, and subsequently were written out from his notes by Roger MacBride Allen; and it's worth noting that an entire cottage industry has popped up since his death for novels by other authors set in this massive pervasive universe, endorsed and sometimes commissioned by Asimov's estate, including two more Foundation books and another 11 robot novels. Whew!]

I've read maybe two-thirds of these books already, scattered over the years in a random order, but I thought it'd be fun to finally read them all in the chronological order of the events themselves, which means hopping back and forth between the '50s books and the '80s books on a regular basis. I started with the "Robot" stories, which for many years was collected into a single book known as I, Robot, but then expanded in the '80s into the newly titled The Complete Robot. They were generally like I remembered them being, although I have to confess that early Asimov isn't holding up well at all as we get ready here to enter the 2020s, a kind of shiny optimistic Mid-Century Modernist approach to science-fiction that seemed fine if not a little dated when I was a teen in the '80s myself, but that in the 35 years since then (and the now 70 years since they were first written) often seems hopelessly outdated to the point of historical curiosity instead of contemporary pleasure read. These '40s and '50s stories seem to be most remarkable now for what Asimov missed about the future than what he got right, or for the ways that the standards and more of his own times bleed into these fantastical stories; they're set in a world where people can travel between planets but smoke unfiltered cigarettes the entire way, where women can build robots but are still non-ironically criticized for their "crazy hormonal mood swings," where computers are still the size of rooms and are still operated through thousands of mechanical switches. (In fact, one of the most telling stories here is the one where humans direct an artificially intelligent computer to build a cutting-edge spaceship on their behalf, then are convinced that the computer has malfunctioned when it builds a ship whose bridge contains only a single plasma screen to run the entire thing.)

Thankfully, though, the later Robot novels continue to hold up a lot better; and that's mainly because Asimov made the decision to write them as traditional murder mysteries, only set in a futuristic world where a hard-edged cop gets partnered with a bleeding-edge human-looking robot, giving Asimov plenty of opportunities to obliquely look at the robot-filled universe where the stories take place, as well as build up an impressive history of this universe-building that would ultimately end up informing the rest of the series after them. The first, The Caves of Steel, is set at a time when humanity has basically broken up into two subsects -- there are the "Spacers," who have embraced robots as a means of expanding into roughly 50 other planets, and then the remaining Earthlings, who treat robots with contempt and fear, but whose planet has become so overcrowded as a result that humanity now lives in giant megacities that burrow miles underneath the planet's crust, forcing most humans to have crippling agoraphobia because of never spending even a single moment anymore on the planet's surface. We follow one of these harried molemen Earthlings, police detective Elijah Baley, as he investigates the murder of a Spacer ambassador, and is unwillingly assigned as his partner a Spacer robot named R. Daneel Olivaw, the latest model in a largely unknown new series of robots that look and act almost exactly like flesh-and-blood humans. Then in the second novel, The Naked Sun, the action moves to an almost opposite situation -- the Spacer planet Solaria, which houses a population of only 20,000 people, making each citizen essentially the sole master of their own individual city-state maintained by thousands of robots, but who have a crippling fear of being in the same room as any other biological creature.

Just like the Robot short stories, the Robot novels have to be taken with a grain of salt, and forgiven for their 1950s literary crimes if they're to be enjoyed at all; and it's also important to remember that they both originally ran serially in science-fiction pulp magazines before being collected as books, which tends to make each chapter end on an overly melodramatic cliffhanger note, just to be immediately resolved in the first paragraph of the next chapter. But still, these are loads better than the short stories which started the series, still enjoyable as contemporary reads as long as you squint a little and are tolerant of their clunky bits. And most importantly, Asimov is very clever here at setting up what he wants the main message of the entire series to be, simply by making little side comments here and there throughout their page counts; that humanity is doomed by taking either the Earth attitude or the Solaria one, that we as a species need to embrace not only technology but also good old-fashioned human effort and fellowship, to use robots to ease the backbreaking menial work of terraforming but not let them usurp our ability to think and innovate. Asimov would expand on this theory in the third Robot novel, then use the concept as the basis for the background of the Empire and Foundation novels (basically, the idea that the original 50 Spacer worlds eventually died out through inertia, while the humans of Earth eventually abandoned the planet altogether in order to populate the entire rest of the galaxy). But more on this when I review The Robots of Dawn next month.

Isaac Asimov books being reviewed for this series: I, Robot (1950) | The Caves of Steel (1954) | The Naked Sun (1957) | The Robots of Dawn (1983) | Robots and Empire (1985) | The Stars, Like Dust (1951) | The Currents of Space (1952) | Pebble in the Sky (1950) | Prelude to Foundation (1988) | Forward the Foundation (1993) | Foundation (1951) | Foundation and Empire (1952) | Second Foundation (1953) | Foundation's Edge (1982) | Foundation and Earth (1986)