The Rest Of The Robots

The Rest of the Robots (1997) – Isaac Asimov
HarperCollinsPublishers | ISBN: 9780586025949
Condition: Good | Sold by Crappy Old Books

Robots. Humanity has been dreaming about them for generations, largely because the prospect of inventing intelligent machines capable of doing all the unpleasant jobs sounds considerably more attractive than actually doing those jobs ourselves. Unfortunately, as Isaac Asimov repeatedly demonstrates, creating artificial beings that obey instructions, protect their owners and never misbehave is a rather more complicated undertaking than assembling a mechanical servant and telling it to make the tea.

Welcome to The Rest of the Robots, a fascinating collection of Asimov’s celebrated robot stories, in which artificial intelligence, human ingenuity and the occasional spectacular failure of common sense combine to create some of science fiction’s most entertaining intellectual puzzles.

Asimov, one of the great architects of modern science fiction, transformed the literary robot from a lumbering metallic menace into something infinitely more interesting: a logical, sophisticated machine whose behaviour is governed by a carefully constructed set of ethical principles.

His famous Three Laws of Robotics were designed to ensure that robots would not harm human beings, would obey legitimate instructions and would protect their own existence, provided doing so did not conflict with the more important laws. A perfectly sensible arrangement, one might imagine, until somebody discovers that even the clearest rules can produce extraordinary complications when applied to the bewildering irrationality of human behaviour.

Throughout these stories, Asimov explores the strange relationship between people and their mechanical creations. Robots behave unexpectedly, humans misunderstand their own instructions, and apparently straightforward problems develop into elaborate mysteries requiring logic, scientific reasoning and considerably more patience than most people possess.

One of the pleasures of Asimov’s fiction is his refusal to rely upon the conventional science-fiction solution of having everything explode whenever the plot becomes complicated. His stories are frequently detective puzzles disguised as technological adventures, where the challenge is to discover why a robot has behaved in a particular fashion rather than simply finding a sufficiently large weapon to dismantle it.

The collection also reflects changing attitudes towards automation, artificial intelligence and the possibility that machines might eventually become intelligent enough to reveal just how unreasonable their human creators can be.

Originally published in 1964, The Rest of the Robots belongs to a remarkable period of speculative fiction when computers occupied entire rooms, artificial intelligence remained largely theoretical, and the prospect of conversing with an intelligent machine seemed delightfully futuristic.

Today, when computers can compose poetry, generate pictures and confidently provide completely incorrect answers to perfectly reasonable questions, Asimov’s concerns about logic, responsibility and machine behaviour seem more relevant than ever.

This 1997 HarperCollins edition, offered in Good condition by Crappy Old Books, is an excellent addition to any Asimov collection, particularly for readers fascinated by robotics, artificial intelligence and the philosophical difficulties of making machines behave better than the people who invented them.

A witty, ingenious and thought-provoking exploration of humanity’s mechanical future, from a writer who understood that the real problem with intelligent robots might not be the robots themselves.

After all, you can programme a machine to obey three perfectly sensible laws.

Teaching human beings to follow even one is proving rather more difficult.

Keep browsing: See more Science-Fiction books Other books by Isaac Asimov