IRobot : Review

I was wrong.

I thought Asimov’s books were old classics that would bore me to tears and any interesting themes they deal with might already be done to death over time by other books and media.

I was grossly wrong.

IRobot manages to not only stay captivating but also fresh over all these years. It goes beyond the usual themes and tropes that popular robot fiction deals with. The standard questions of what makes us human and what separates humans from robots etc are all trivial when compared with the questions that IRobot asks and sometimes tries to answer.

Through a series of stories, Asimov establishes the laws of robotics and builds his world, while deftly maneuvering through different times and locations.

Over the course of reading this book, I have realized that the book at its core is a collection of detective stories like Sherlock Holmes. Except for the first story, rest of them read like the classic seemingly unsolvable cases that have to be solved with limited resources but abundant deduction and logic. This is Sherlock Holmes in SPACE. With ROBOTS.

In the process of slowly unraveling the cases, Asimov gives us a glimpse into the laws of robotics, the psychology behind it and the kind of unique problems that might arise because of this and also the kind of benefits this provides.

A must read for fans of sci-fi, detective fiction or just plain good stories.

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