johnlog/books

Asimov: The Robots of Dawn

A third installment in the Robot series. A bit too similar to the first two, but this one starts to connect to the Foundation universe, which is great. Overall, it was okay.

SPOILERS I was a little tired of it at first because it felt just like the first two Robot novels: same premise and almost identical development. For context, it is the far future, and humanity has colonized 50 planets called the Spacer worlds. It happened relatively long ago, and the original settlers evolved and enhanced themselves to the point where they are almost a different species now. They are better looking, live longer, and suffer from almost no diseases. They also look down on Earth, which is considered messy and backwards. They use sentient robots, but Earth frowns upon them. There was a murder; this time, the victim is a robot though. And it happened on the main Spacer world, Aurora. A detective from Earth, Elijah, is called to solve it. Just like in the previous books. He asks questions and reasons his way to the solution. There are notions of people on Aurora working on psychohistory at very early stages, which is one of the connections to the Foundation series. Elijah finally gets his answer just before he gets deported (last-minute clutch, just like the first two - see what I mean by repetitive?). The murderer turns out to be another robot, who is also psychic and can influence people's emotions. I'm not sure if I like this reveal and could have done without it. Also, there are a lot of sexual descriptions, and I can tell this one came out much later than the 1950s originals. I don't really like when Asimov writes about sex or describes relationships. It was not bad; it finally links to the Foundation. The sexual descriptions and the psychic robots were meh.