John’s Reviews > The Robot Collection > Status Update

I was surprised to see they restart the page numbering at 1 for the short story collection. I was wondering how page 404 could be halfway through a 500-page book.

I feel they should have started with the short stories instead of the novels. After the polish of the novels, some of these stories feel pretty quaint and rough.

I thought I remembered a warmer relationship between Daneel and "Partner Elijah." Maybe that comes in the third novel. But so far, Baley's a jerk and Daneel is an unfeeling machine, if a polite and considerate one.

That's the second time Baley suggests testing poison on a farm animal. It doesn't make sense that he'd think that way, since his Earth has so few of them. Also these high tech Solarians are remarkably low tech.

I'd forgotten how young Daneel is in this first adventure.

I'm also less certain I've read Caves of Steel before. So much of it is unfamiliar I'm starting to wonder if the familiar parts ate just pings from flashbacks and callbacks in later novels.

I feel like I missed a lot the first time around. Bailey is a lot more hard-boiled, full of class resentments and antipathy for robots, not to mention his society's pervasive agoraphobia. Daneel is so Data it's not funny.

I'd also forgotten this was set 3,000 years in the future. The population numbers seem silly... Earth depleted by 8 billion souls? We have that now.