From the Bookshelf of EVERYONE Has Read This but Me - The Catch-Up Book Club…

I, Robot (Robot, #0.1)

Isaac Asimov

Start date: February 1, 2023

Finish date: February 28, 2023

Discussion: CLASSICS READS

Why we're reading this: February 2023 - Classics Selection
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CLASSICS READS

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What Members Thought

Sep 02, 2015 Canavan rated it liked it

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The stories in I, Robot are probably among the earliest science fiction stories I ever read, so I was curious to see how the passage of time would affect my perception of them. The book is a fix-up — the individual stories were written over a period of about 10 years and subsequently collected in book form. The stories (some, I assume, revised slightly for the collection) are interconnected via a somewhat awkward framing device in which an unnamed reporter interviews Dr. Susan Calvin, a r ✭✭✭

The stories in I, Robot are probably among the earliest science fiction stories I ever read, so I was curious to see how the passage of time would affect my perception of them. The book is a fix-up — the individual stories were written over a period of about 10 years and subsequently collected in book form. The stories (some, I assume, revised slightly for the collection) are interconnected via a somewhat awkward framing device in which an unnamed reporter interviews Dr. Susan Calvin, a robopsychologist who features prominently in Asimov’s fictional history of the “postronic” robot. The stories are for the most part structured as quasi-mysteries; that is, the story protagonists are faced with some aberrant robot behavior and must decipher the origins of such behavior given the constraints of the (by now famous) three robotics laws.

Some of the stories here hold up rather well. But they do highlight Asimov’s limitations as a writer. Characters tend to be rather one dimensional and the writing itself is often a bit clunky; there’s an over-reliance, for example, on dialog tags (people are alway snarling, &c., &c.). By and large, I preferred those stories which featured Calvin as opposed to those with the Gregory/Donovan duo. The story I liked best is the one least like any of the others — “Robbie” was the first robot story written by Asimov, inspired, he said, by Eando Binder’s short story, “I, Robot”. Unlike the other stories, “Robbie” is less about hard-to-decipher robotic behavior than about human behavior vis-à-vis robots. It’s not perfect and it’s pretty mawkish, but I have a high tolerance for that kind of stuff.

“Robbie” (variant title: “Strange Bedfellow”) (1940) ✭✭✭✭½
“Runaround” (1942) ✭✭½
“Reason” (1941) ✭✭✭½
“Catch That Rabbit” (1944) ✭✭
“Liar!” (1941) ✭✭½
“Little Lost Robot” (1947) ✭✭✭½
“Escape!” (1945) ✭✭
“Evidence” (1946) ✭✭✭✭
“The Evitable Conflict” (1950) ✭✭✭½ ...more

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