For my second Sci Fi Experience book, I read I, Robot by Isaac Asimov.  It hasn’t been sitting on my shelf, but it is one I’ve been meaning to read for ages.  And as with a lot of books like that, it turned out to be a faster read than I expected–and not much like my preconceptions of the book.

I always thought this was a collection of short stories, and it is, but they’re far more inter-connected than I had expected.  They’re set in what, at the time of writing, was the future (although we’ve since caught up).  It’s a world like ours, except humans have built advanced robots.  They’re exactly what you’d expect of science fiction robots (maybe they set some of the expectations!)–metallic, roughly humanoid, capable of walking and talking and performing a surprising amount of what at least looks like independent thought.  They’re governed by the famous Three Laws of Robotics.

In brief, the laws are: First, no robot can harm a human or allow a human to come to harm through inaction; Second, robots must obey human orders, unless they conflict with the first law; Third, robots must preserve themselves, unless that would be in conflict with the first or second laws.

The stories, not surprisingly, are mostly about robots that are malfunctioning or otherwise acting oddly, often because of an issue involving the Three Laws.  The stories are loosely linked by a frame-story, an interview with Dr. Susan Calvin, the leading robopsychologist.  She recounts stories from the history of robotics, primarily focusing on two groups of characters: either Powell and Donovan, two scientists who keep getting into trouble with robots on the fringes of civilization; or Dr. Calvin herself and the executives at U.S. Robots Inc.

The Three Laws seem straight-forward enough, but Asimov finds plenty of ways for their application to become confused, contradictory or otherwise corrupted.  There’s a robot who gets drunk when he can’t figure out which law to obey; another takes literally the order to go lose himself.

Characters, even though they are recurring, are not really the strong point of this book.  Most of the humans are not very distinctive.  It’s the robots who make the book interesting–and sometimes have more developed personalities than the humans!  One of my favorite stories is about a robot who doesn’t believe it when humans say they built him, and decides to reason out the truth of the world himself; he swiftly creates a kind of religion for robots, with himself as its prophet.

In some ways, the level of personality in the robots became a little disturbing.  This book is primarily about protecting humans from robots.  There’s nothing about protecting robots from humans–and when you have robots with independent thought, who appear as fairly developed characters, it gets hard to not look at them as people.  In particular there was one scene where Dr. Calvin was interviewing a robot.  She starts addressing the robot as “boy,” while the robot is calling her “ma’am.”  Suddenly you have the language of slavery, and it feels strange.  I know Asimov wrote other Robot books; I’ve read “Bicentennial Man,” which is largely about robot rights, so it’s not an entirely ignored issue…but it would be nice to see it addressed somewhere in this book too.

My favorite story is the first one, “Robbie.”  It’s certainly the sweetest, and is the one depicted on the cover.  It’s about a little girl and her beloved robot nursemaid, and what happens when her parents try to take the robot away.  (That makes it sound like Bradbury’s story, “The Veldt,” and it’s actually not at all like that!)

My last sci fi read made me think about humanity.  This one felt more like it was genuinely about the psychology of robots.  And how we relate to them, and what they say about us…but mostly how their minds work.  But that’s all right, because they work in fascinating ways!

And I think I can safely say that this one is not only classic sci fi, it’s a sci fi classic.  🙂

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I finished my first book of 2012 and, feeling very virtuous, I managed to make it one which applied to two of my challenges!  Five-Odd, a collection of five (longish) short stories, edited by Groff Conklin, applies to both the Sci-Fi Experience and the Dusty Bookshelf Challenge.

I’ve decided Dusty Bookshelf reviews deserve a little back-story.

How long has it been on my shelf? Since August, 2011, so about four months.

I almost never buy unread books, so how did I get it? My Book Club had an all-holiday party in August (because there aren’t any major holidays in August), and I picked this up at the White Elephant gift exchange.

Now that I’ve read it, am I keeping it? I haven’t decided.  I liked it–but I have high standards about what books I own.  I’ll see how I feel about it when I have a little distance–say, next month.

Five-Odd is a nice mix of intriguing technology and of philosophy.  It’s definitely not action-adventure sci fi.  Most of the stories are about futures not so different from our present, except for some crucial advance in technology, and changes in thought because of it.  Almost every story made me think about some aspect of the world and, more often, of humanity.

Isaac Asimov’s “The Dead Past” asks whether the past really is dead, while also looking at government repression and the end of privacy–but not at all the way that sentence makes it sound.  The story centers around a fascinating device that will let anyone look at past moments.

“Something Strange” by Kingsley Amis felt like the weak link here to me.  It’s about four people living together on a small space station, but the characters were too surreal in some ways, and then the story ended just as it felt like it was coming to the most interesting part.

J.T. McIntosh’s “Unit” addresses a question about identity.  It then veers off into a story more about prejudices, piracy and collaborative intelligence, which was also interesting though I would have liked more about the idea the story started with–about people who choose to wipe away their entire past, and be entirely remade as new people with new personalities.

“Gone Fishing” by James H. Schmitz is about a conman who thinks he’s going to steal a transporter device from a befuddled scientist, only to wind up stranded on a distant planet for five years.  The transporter was interesting, but more interesting was the idea of how he would cope with five years of solitude.

“Big Ancestor” by F. L. Wallace is set the farthest in the future, when humans from Earth have reached the stars, and met humans from a hundred other planets.  A team of scientists from various planets goes in search of their common ancestor.  There’s an excellent twist to this, and I recommend not reading Conklin’s introduction, which blatantly hints at it.  There’s also an interesting passing line here, when one human mentions that most of the human races discovered space travel on their own, and then they helped the ones that didn’t.  After all my years of hearing about Star Trek‘s Prime Directive, General Order Number One, to never ever ever ever interfere with less developed races, this was shocking.  And yes, I know Star Trek does it all the time anyway 🙂 but it felt very different hearing it as an accepted thing!

I felt a little doubtful about reviewing this one because I wondered how easy it would be for anyone to find it.  But it turns out it’s available cheap on Amazon if you do want it (and no one paid me for that link!)  If you like philosophical sci fi, it’s a good read.  The stories were written in the ’50s and ’60s and have that flavor.  I don’t know that I’d call them sci fi classics, but they are classic sci fi…if you see the distinction there!  🙂