Robots And Empire
Isaac Asimov - Robots And Empire
The fourth and final installment of the Robots books came as a pleasant surprise to me. The Robots of Dawn I believe I described as ‘meh’, or ‘enh’, and the first few Empire books were less pleasant than that. So when I picked up Robots and Empire to wrap up the books, I wasn’t expecting much. It was a longish book, and the quality of Asimov’s writing seems to be inversely proportional to the length, and at a few hundred pages, I didn’t expect much.
What I came to realize was this book is actually a study on the role of technology (in this instance, robots) in society, and the balancing of the needs of one versus the needs of all. Robots that behave according to the Three Laws of Robotics, can never harm a single human in order to protect the future of humanity, as humanity is a largely intangible concept, and any particular human is a known entity.
The majority of this book happens in small flashback vignettes, where Asimov excels, and much of the rest is a dialog between Daneel Olivaw and another robot named Giskard. Giskard has the ability to read and alter human minds, but Daneel is one of the most advanced humanoid robots ever created. These two spend the majority of the book discussing how they can alter their programming in order to prevent the long-lived Spacers from waging war against the short-lived Earthmen.
There was some plot, but not a lot, but overall, I really just enjoyed the debates between Daneel and Giskard. Asimov said that he wanted to make Daneel the real hero of the Empire and the Robots series, but I don’t think it was the greatest idea. It came across as the humans involved having no foresight or control in their own destiny. I would have preferred if the humans had been able to figure things out for themselves.
I liked this book. I’m glad I’m done with the Empire and Robots books, though. Time to move on to some new books and authours.
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