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UK Authors - Sci-fi & fantasy |
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Isaac Asimov’s Robot City Volumes 1 & 2 |
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I saac Asimov’s Robot City Volumes 1 & 2By Michael P. Kube-McDowell & Michael McQuay Ibooks - Simon & Schuster 448 pages, 2000 ISBN 0671038931 Reviewed by our UK Editor Rachel A. Hyde The science fiction of Asimov is a world away from the fantasy-influenced Space Opera as typified by the Star Trek series and Star Wars. This was hard SF at its best – a marriage between science (and all the wonder and joy of discovery that it engenders) and fiction. Although Asimov is no more, his ideas live on in the Ibooks’ Robot City series - where today’s SF writers recreate his own particular type of robots and their world. There are two linked stories in this book, and one follows on directly from the other. In the first story, a man awakens to find that he doesn’t know who he is. He takes the first name he sees – Derec – and from then on his destiny is tied up with robots. First he is taken prisoner by the malign Aranimas and his hapless canine servant Wolruf and forced to build robots. Then when he meets up with Katherine (who apparently knows who he is and has secrets of her own but refuses to tell him anything) and manages to escape, he ends up in more trouble. In the second book, the pair are stranded in Robot City where the mechanical denizens accuse them of murdering a human being. It is up to them to solve the mystery and more besides. At the end of Robot City there are still unanswered questions, as in Ibooks’ Venus Prime series. Asimov’s robots are tools and behave like programmed machines, capable of doing their tasks and operating within the bounds of their limitations – just like robots would do if we were capable of creating anything so sophisticated. What I particularly liked was the fact that there was plenty of science and plenty of fiction in this book. But as Asimov says in his introduction, the robots are not there to symbolise any badly-treated minority group or to be symbols of man’s overweening vanity of playing God and creating a form of life. In short, this was no political tract but a good tale well told, albeit a little wordy in the first story. It is interesting that of the two stories in this volume, the first is far longer than the second, yet it is the second that is outlined on the reverse of the book. I am eager to find out what happens to Derec and Katherine in the next tale. Refreshingly free of clutter and very akin to Asimov’s own early work, Robot City ought to have many fans. |
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