Travels with Charley

Posted on July 16, 2010 by smellincoffee

Travels with Charley in Search of America
© 1962 John Steinbeck
246 pages

Author John Steinbeck is perhaps most famous for The Grapes of Wrath, the story of the displaced Joad family who travel to California from their home in  Oklahoma in search of work, experiencing the land and its people as they do. In the early sixties, Steinbeck felt that he ought to make a journey of his own — to truly experience the North American continent and the people of the United States. Since becoming an established author, his travels amounted to air trips between metropolises. Seeking a more familiar perspective, he set out in his camper-truck Rocinante, accompanied by his French bleu poodle Charley, and set forth. Starting in New York, he travels first to Maine, then across the midwest to the Pacific northwest, then down through California, across Texas, and curves upward through the south until he’s in New York once more.

Steinbeck writes here with an intentional conversational tone. He often addresses the reader directly, as he does in the beginning when he informs the reader that we should imagine him talking to us while he drives or cooks at night. His reflections about his experiences sometimes take the form of a conversation with his dog, Charley — and sometimes, Charley talks back.  Steinbeck is gifted at describing the scenery he not only sees, but in the case of wonders like the Redwoods, experiences.  Although he appears to enjoy his conversations with the people he visits,  visiting the South — in the throes of the Civil Rights movement, where a band of middle-aged women delight in yelling racial slurs at young black children who have won admittance into a whites-only public school —  sours his mood as he returns home.

A recurring theme in Steinbeck’s observations is the increasing homogeneity and staleness of American culture. National television and radio outlets have created a standard American language, and he despairs the loss of regional dialects. He has little love for the increasing role of plastic in everyday lives, and what it represents: mass-produced artificiality.

Although the trip ends on a poor note and Steinbeck does not like all of what he sees, he tempers his grumbling with the knowledge that is the nature of people to resist change in their old age. Perhaps America has lost some of its wild vivaciousness, but he doesn’t take his complaints as withering criticisms. Travels abounds with humor,  benefiting from Steinbeck’s dry wit and some of the conversations he has themselves.  I read this first in 2005, and it has lingered with me since:  this was the first work I ever read that grappled with changing culture in a real way. For its story, Steinbeck’s musings, and his humor, I would recommend Travels with Charley.

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Teaser Tuesday (13-7)

Posted on July 13, 2010 by smellincoffee
Patriots and citizens, we are ready for Teaser Tuesday — to the barricades!

In their own persons, Lafayette and Talleyrand embodied the split personality of the French Revolution. For while it is commonplace to recognize that the Revolution gave birth to a new kind of political world, it is less often understood that that world was the product of two irreconcilable interests — the creation of a potent state and the creation of a community of free citizens. The fiction of the Revolution was to imagine that one might be served without damaging the other and its history amounts to the realization of that impossibility. 

Citizens: a Chronicle of the French Revolution. p. 15, author Simon Schama.

Discarded Teaser:
“The rat problem became so serious that local residents found their own houses colonized by the raiding parties sent out from the elephant.” – p. 4

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Stargazer: Three

Posted on July 12, 2010 by smellincoffee

Stargazer: Three
© 2003 Michael Jan Friedman
247 pages

In addition to beginning the TNG relaunch this year, I also intend to pick up on loose threads in Trek literature that I have either left undone or never examined in the first place.  Encountering Picard’s former shipmates from the Stargazer in Death in Winter left me thinking about the Stargazer series by Michael Jan Friedman, telling the stories of Picard’s first command as a young 20-something. The first two novels in this series rank among my favorite works of Trek literature, but I’ve read the series through to completion despite having most of the books. I decided to remdy that, although I did not intend to do so today. I picked up the book at lunch, and…didn’t put it down for the duration of the afternoon.

Stargazer: Three is third in the series, if the deceptively dull name is not too big a hint. The title initially disappointed me, but as I progressed deeper into the plot I realized Friedman had more in mind when titling the book than it simply following the second novel, Progenitor. As the story opens, Jean-Luc Picard is young man still in his twenties, commanding the Constellation-class ship Stargazer. Picard is the youngest man in Starfleet history to captain a vessel, an achievement that followed his taking command of the vessel during a crisis that saw the ship’s former captain and first officer killed.  Not everyone appreciates Picard’s accomplishment, chiefly his commanding officer: Admiral McAteer. McAteer wants to strip the young whippersnapper of his command, but cannot do so without proving him incompetent. In an effort to ruin Picard’s name, McAteer routinely gives Picard missions beyond his experience, hoping to see the young man fail. Unfortunately for McAteer, the crew of the Stargazer prove worthy of the challenge time after time.

In Three, the Stargazer is sent to investigate a curious anamoloy on the Federation border with an aggressive, hostile race while its chief weapons officer, Lieutenant Vigo, is attending a security conference unveiling a new disrupter. When the Stargazer draws near the anamoly, a familar but alien face arrives in its transporter — a woman who appears identical to two of Picard’s officers, the Lieutenants Gerda and Idun Asmund. The stranger claims to be a Lieutenant Asmund from a Stargazer in another universe. She has arrived on Picard’s Stargazer unexpectedly via a transporter curiosity. Picard must investigate the woman’s claims, and find a way to send her back to her proper time while not provoking a nearby alien flotilla which has claimed the anamoly as its own.  Meanwhile, rebels intending to start a revolution on their home planet ambush the Federation conference and attempt to steal the new weapon: aiding them is Lieutenant Vigo’s old friend and mentor.

Three develops the backstory for the Asmund lieutenants, who serve as navigator and helm officer respectively. Although biologically human, the two were orphaned as children and rescued by a Klingon captain who took pity on them. He and his wife later adopted the two, and raised them as Klingons — a story mirrored by one of Picard’s officers in the future, Commander Worf — who is Klingon, but raised on Earth by humans.  The Asmund sisters see themselves as a pair, and Gerda is thrown off her stride by the appearance of this third Asmund, who claims her twin sister died in childbirth. While Idun immediately embraces the third Asmund, Gerda is suspicious and jealous: she does not believe the stranger to be who she says she is.

While providing both action and mystery, Friedman also continues developing his main characters. The crew of the Stargazer had immediate appeal for me when I read the first novel so many years ago, and I appreciate his continuing to spend time on them apart from the main plot. The plot itself isn’t quite as interesting as the first novel, but then again it set a high standard for me. There are a few hat-tips made to the Next Generation show, as when Picard — moving around his cramped ready room — muses that one day he will have a room big enough for him to display personal items, keep fish, and maybe have a couch for visitors. Trek-lit readers will enjoy this, although newcomers should probably start with the first novel before leaping into this plot.

Related:

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The Andromeda Strain

Posted on July 11, 2010 by smellincoffee

The Andromeda Strain
© 1969 Michael Crichton
295 pages

Hours after an American space probe crash-landed in the Nevada desert, the entire populace of a small town nearby deserted their homes to die in the streets, where they were noticed by a US air pilot performing a flyover of the scene. There’s something rotten in Piedmont.

The US Army is not entirely surprised to find the city a necropolis. They did, after all, design the probe to gather potential microorganisms in Earth orbit for use in biological warfare. In a way, the outbreak is a success: they’ve got a genuine killer on their hands. Too bad it’s out of their control for the moment — but that won’t be the case for long, Moving swiftly, they isolate the area and quarantine suspected contagions. Agents dressed in hazard suits survey the wasted town, and find two survivors: a crying baby and old man spitting up blood. While most of the victims appeared to have died instantly, others appear to have killed themselves in fits of insanity. The scientists and government officials associated with the “Wildfire” project must discern what agent caused these deaths, from where it originated, and how it might be stopped.

Although I expected a The Stand-type horror novel, Crichton’s work is altogether different. It reads as a technical documentary, Crichton employing a framing device that cites official reports and includes graphs. The exposition is extremely detailed, describing the whole of the Wildfire installation — a hidden, underground base used for isolating and containing bio-warfare specimens — elaborating on possible sources for the virus, its structure,  and detailing the ways the scientists’ and government officials’ thinking and plans went wrong.  The narrative voice assures us from the start that things will go to hell, although the reader is left to anticipate to what degree the outbreak will ravage the United States and the world. I can’t say I expected the ending: I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it did — somewhat.

Although the book succeeded in keeping me wondering how the plot would be resolved, what fascinated me most was the origin story for the organism brought down to Earth. The Andromeda Strain  is probably worth your while, especially if you enjoy medical and scientific thrillers.

Related:

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A Walk Across America

Posted on July 8, 2010 by smellincoffee

A Walk Across America
© 1979 Peter Jenkins
288 pages

We walked straight west. I had everything I needed in the world resting comfortably on my shoulders, and the entire country waiting to be discovered.  (p.55)

In the late spring of 1973, Peter Jenkins decided to go for a walk. The increasingly jaded college graduate, still recovering from a divorce, was willing to quit America all together. War and government corruption rendered him a cynic about the country’s worth and promise, and a growing sense of wanderlust urged him to drop off the grid altogether. Urged by family members to see first-hand the country he was willing to leave on foot, Jenkins and his Alaskan Malamute Cooper set off on a journey to meet the land and people. The whole of the journey is not contained within this book, for he stops in New Orleans to chronicle the first great part of the story. Beginning in Connecticut, Jenkins hikes to D.C, then through the Carolinas and Virginia, across part of Tennessee, down through Alabama, and then west across the Gulf Coast until he stops to rest in New Orleans.

The road between Connecticut and Louisiana connects Jenkins’ story with the lives of others — an old mountain man with a reputation for shooting intruders,  grizzled lumberyard workers, ranchers, hippies, evangelists,  the Alabamian governor, paranoid drunks, and murderous lawmen. He meets friends and foes as he hikes through the mountains and down to the Gulf Coast, braving the Appalachian winter and the Deep South’s humid, scorching summers. Although few photographs depict the surroundings, their beauty is made clear through Jenkins’ descriptions, and the stories he tells about the characters he meets are almost too hard to believe — particularly one in which he was literally run out of town by a lynch mob, keen on doing him in for looking like a hippie. Jenkin’s stories are set in a different time: when he walks through Selma, Alabama, for instance, the massacre at the town’s bridge during the Civil Rights movement is only a few years in the past. Segregationist George Wallace still reigns supreme in Montgomery, and in Tennessee, Stephen Gaskin’s “Farm” is growing in size.  Jenkins spends the better part of a year navigating from Connecticut to Orleans, occasionally stopping to work in order to save up money for another leg of the journey. He spends a few weeks at The Farm, noting that its emphasis on simplicity seems contrived next to the simplicity of life he’s found on the road: he moves on when the cultish atmosphere spooks him.

Jenkins is an enjoyable writer, communicating the humor, terror, despondency, and hope that his walk stirs in him. I identified with him immediately, being a restless college graduate who also wants to retreat from modern society. His tone made it clear that between starting the journey and writing the novel, he’s converted to something: he introduces his Connecticut self in the same way Bill O’Reilly might introduce a guest he despises.  That tone makes him hard to take seriously, but once he hits the road his experiences take first priority. Although many of the stories are hilarious in themselves, he often sets up jokes. In the final section, for instance, he writes that he looked forward to staying at the seminary in New Orleans for a while: there would be no girls, there, no distractions. Naturally he meets his second wife. Sections are headed off by illustrations that overlay scenes from his travels across a map of his route: I particularly enjoyed these illustrations.

A sectional illustration, depicting a revival scene in Mobile (where Jenkins was “saved”, one of Mobile’s great trees (which he fawned over), a farmhouse he stayed at for a week or so, and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a Civil Rights monument. 

A Walk Across America will remain one of the more interesting books I’ve read, I think. Although I enjoyed reading a book about life on the road — something I’ve been looking for for a while now — Jenkins’ story resonated with me not only because of our similar stations in life when he started this walk, but for the places he walked through. While Americans — and particularly those who live along the eastern and southeastern coasts of America — will enjoy this most, I would recommend it to  general audiences for the stories alone. Jenkins has written other books, which I will be reading.

Related:

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This Week at the Library (7/7)

Posted on July 7, 2010 by smellincoffee

I never intended to make this last week “Science Fiction Week”, but it emerged that way following a series of coincidences. I finished Carl Sagan’s Contact a few days later than anticipated: his book, which portrays humanity’s first contact with an alien race via radio signals, changed the way I thought about the search for extraterrestrial life.  I found American Nerd, an entertaining if limited “history of nerds”, while looking for a science book. My decision to read Jurassic Park owed to my seeing the movie the night before I made my weekly visit to the library,  and after watching the first six Trek movies in marathon form, I was in a mood to read something in Trek literature — which I did with Greater than the Sum,  an excellent contribution to the TNG relaunch that sets up the big Destiny series. I just so happened to finish Quotable Star Trek this week, as I’ve been reading it on-and-off at the computer while waiting for programs to load and save. Also, after reading a July Fourth-themed story for the Fourth this Sunday, I just had to finish the collection in which I found it, The Complete Robot.

See? Complete accident.

Selected Quotations:
1. “You know, at times like this, one feels….. well, perhaps extinct animals should be left extinct.” – Dr. Ian Malcolm, awaiting to be mauled by a T-rex.  (Jurassic Park)

2.  “Your willingness to participate in this mission is commendable, Lieutenant Chen. Or do you prefer Lieutenant T’Ryssa?”
“Chen, please,” said the lieutenant, a slender woman with tomboyish Asian features under slanted brows. With her hair worn over her hears, those eyebrows and the greenish flush to her golden skin were the only clear evidence of her Vulcan ancestry. “Uh, sir. Or Trys. I’ve been known to answer to ‘Hey you'”.
[Picard] glared at her. “As you were, Lieutenant.” (Greater than the Sum, p. 68. )

3. Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Your… arrogant pretense at being the moral guardians of the universe strikes me as being hollow, Q. I see no evidence that you’re guided by a superior moral code or any code whatsoever. You may be nearly omnipotent, and I don’t deny that your… parlor tricks are very impressive. But morality? I don’t see it. I don’t acknowledge it, Q! I would put human morality against the Q’s any day. And perhaps that’s the reason that we fascinate you so – because our puny behavior shows you a glimmer of the one thing that evades your omnipotence: a moral center. And if so, I can think of no crueler irony than that you should destroy this young woman, whose only crime is that she’s too human.
Q: Jean-Luc… Sometimes I think the only reason I come here is to listen to these wonderful speeches of yours.
(Quotable Star Trek, maybe. I’m sure it’s in there somewhere. Original source is TNG’s “Hide and Q”. I like it mostly because the same statement condemns the morality of revered “ancestors” and their deities….gods who claim to be just when their stock in trade is genocide, theft, and murder.)

Upcoming Reads:

  • The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton.  I enjoyed my first Crichton read, and decided to continue exploring the author’s work.  This work, which concerns the outbreak of an alien virus on Earth, reminds me of The Stand.
  • I’m going to be starting Citizens: a Chronicle of the French Revolution in honor of Bastille Day, which falls next week. (The holiday, not the Bastille. It fell back in 1789.) My Western Civilization II history professor recommended the book to me a few years ago.
  • I first read Travels with Charley in Search of America back in 2005, which contains John Steinbeck’s account of traveling through the United States in the 1960s to see the new, economically booming America. I’ve been itching to read a book about taking off on the road and exploring, and so decided to revisit this.
  • Right next to Travels with Charley was A Walk Across America, a 1970s memoir about a young college graduate who decided to explore the United States on foot, accompanied by his big husky, Cooper.  If memory serves, Steinbeck’s “Charley” was his dog, so I’ll be reading two books about people who set off on journeys across America accompanied by their dogs, one old and one young. That’ll be interesting. 
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Greater than the Sum

Posted on July 7, 2010 by smellincoffee

Greater than the Sum
© Christopher L. Bennett 2008
368 pages

Fresh from his honeymoon with Dr. Beverly Crusher, Jean-Luc Picard has returned to the Enterprise-E to assemble a new command staff in the wake of recent losses in battle. Finding the right people to meet the demands of the Federation flagship is problematic, but news from the Beta Quadrant will render staffing problems trivial: the Borg are back.

After the events of Death in Winter, a Borg cube launched an attack on the Federation and brutalized it in a way not seen since Wolf 359. They were driven way, but assimilated a Federation science vessel before vanishing completely. That science vessel, the USS Einstein, was reported destroyed, but its attack on the USS Rhea, a Federation starship assigned to investigate a system in the Beta Quadrant proves otherwise. The Borg-controlled Einstein — known in Starfleet enlisted ranks now as the Frankenstein — is a threat to the Federation, not for its own armament but for the knowledge it possesses. The Federation’s greatest defense against the Borg is the gulf of space between the Federation and the Borg Collective — but that curious system in the Beta Quadrant may hold the secret to quantum slip-stream warp drives, which would make the Milky Way as transversable as a local star system. The Frankenstein cannot be permitted to return to the Delta Quadrant, lest the Borg gain that knowledge.

Picard is given ultimate discretion in how he chooses to combat the threat, and reluctantly chooses to include the young officer who survived the attack on the Rhea as part of his staff. The excitable, immature officer doesn’t appear to be Starfleet material, let alone an officer distinct enough to serve on the bridge of the Federation flagship — but something about her compels Picard to give her a chance. Together with a ship of ex-drones — the Liberated, led by Hugh — Picard must find a way to destroy the ever-adaptive and increasingly aggressive Borg before they are able to adapt slipstream technology to their uses and return to the Collective, where they will share that knowledge and give the Borg a way to dominate the entire Milky Way.

Greater than the Sum is one of the best Trek books I’ve read. Although the mission is essentially military, Bennet focuses on character development, diplomacy with a new form of life, and scientific investigation. Bennett’s pacing worked well for me: ultimate confrontation with the ship is delayed, allowing tension to build. In the meantime, Bennett focuses on Picard and his new officer, Lieutenant Chen. I didn’t like Chen at first, thinking her sophomoric: I didn’t realize her immature disposition was deliberate until Bennett starting bouncing her personality off of Picard’s, at which point hilarity ensued.  While she begins as a hyperactive and childish Ro Laren-type with pointed ears, Chen matures throughout the book and I looked forward to her scenes. Bennett also explores Picard and Crusher’s married life, particularly the motives behind Picard’s reluctance to start a family. His official explanation is that having children would be irresponsible in light of the Borg threat, but the real motives are more nuanced and draw from various Trek episodes, including The Inner Light.  Although Greater than the Sum continues the story begun in previous TNG Relaunch novels, Bennett’s background exposition was sufficient and unintrusive. It’s thus a easy recommendation for both fans of Trek literature and of The Next Generation itself.

Related:

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Teaser Tuesday (7-7)

Posted on July 6, 2010 by smellincoffee

Once a week you get a peek, although Teaser Tuesdays must be discrete.

Across the table, Worf was still being Worf. “A junior lieutenant with a history of discipline problems walks out of the woods naked and tells us the Borg are coming,” the Klingon asked, “and we are supposed to believe her?”

Greater than the Sum, Christopher Bennett. p. 38.

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Quotable Star Trek

Posted on July 5, 2010 by smellincoffee

Quotable Star Trek
© 1999 ed. Jill Sherwin
374 pages

“…good words. That’s where ideas begin.” – David Marcus, The Wrath of Khan.

With over seven hundred television episodes and eleven movies constituting its ‘canon’, Star Trek has a lot to say for itself. Although a science fiction action-adventure series in which humanity explores the wonders of the universe, Star Trek has survived and flourished where Lost in Space and others have faded away because at its essence, it is about ideas — about the human condition, philosophy, ideals, values, and beliefs. Star Trek and the shows that followed not only entertained, they provoked discussion: they challenged people to consider ideas.

As a show with an intellectual or philosophical bent, Star Trek relied upon good writing to give voice to discussion. Within the shows, there are grand speeches, witty retorts, lines drawn in the sand, gentle reassurances, and thoughtful musings aplenty. Those speeches and retorts are here, organized into diverse topics: the human condition, the search for knowledge, good and evil, love, humor, respect, justice, peace and war, politics, prejudice, logic and emotion are just a few. These are followed by a section of quotations wherein the characters refer to themselves, a section of the most memorable lines from the show, and the author’s personal favorites. The collection does not draw from the later TNG movies or Enterprise given its publication date, which is a minor loss.

This book gathers together some of my favorite moments in Star Trek. I dearly love the series, chiefly for the way it affirms and celebrate humanity. Whether in fighting for justice or trying to be good friends, the Starfleet personnel in the series do their best to live up to humanity’s promise. Quotable Star Trek brings together some of the best lines in Star Trek, neatly organized, and so I can recommend it easily.

A few favorites…

  • “Give me your hand … your hand! Now feel that: Human flesh against human flesh. We’re the same. We share the same history, the same heritage, the same lives. We’re tied together beyond any untying. Man or woman, it makes no difference, we’re human. We couldn’t escape from each other even if we wanted to. That’s how you do it, Lieutenant. By remembering who and what you are: a bit of flesh and blood afloat in a universe without end. And the only thing that’s truly yours is the rest of humanity. That’s where our duty lies. Do you understand me?” – Captain Kirk, “Who Mourns for Adonais?”
  • “Why does God need a starship?” – Captain Kirk, The Final Frontier.
  • “Sometimes, Number One, you just have to bow to the absurd….” – Captain Picard, “Up the Long Ladder”. 
  • “You know, there are some words I’ve known since I was a schoolboy: ‘With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.’ Those words were uttered by Judge Aaron Satie as wisdom and warning. The first time any man’s freedom is trodden on we’re all damaged.” – Captain Picard, The Drumhead
  • “Laws change, depending on who’s making them, but justice is justice.” – Constable Odo, “A Man Alone”
  • “My god, Bones — what’ve I done?”
    “What you had to do. What you always do — turn death into a fighting chance to live.” – Kirk and McCoy, watching the Enterprise go to her grave in The Search for Spock. 
  • “There! Are! FOUR! Lights!” Captain Picard, “Chain of Command”. 
  • “I’m no angel; but I try to live every day as the best human being I know how to be.” – Miles O’Brien, “Tribunal”. 
  • “Second star to the right…and straight on ’til morning.” – Captain Kirk, The Undiscovered Country, giving the helm course orders. 
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The Complete Robot

Posted on July 4, 2010 by smellincoffee

The Complete Robot
© 1982 Isaac Asimov
688 pages

A boom in electronic engineering followed World War 2, one that led to consumer televisions, the first computers, and a wide variety of other electricity-using gadgets. As people looked more toward the future, they conceived of mechanical men: these robots often ran amok in the style of Frankenstein’s monster. Isaac Asimov thought this silly: robots were tools explicitly designed by intelligent people. It made no sense for them to run amok. He subsequently developed in full the Three Laws of Robotics, and later wrote a host of stories and novels based on them.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov used his stories to explore how humans might use robots to better the human condition, but he also explored questions of intelligence, creativity, sentience, and prejudice. He coined the phrase robotics and his body of work subsequently left various marks on our culture: the android Lieutenant Commander Data of Star Trek possesses one of Asimov’s “positronic brains”, for instance. The Complete Robot collects just over thirty of his short stories in this theme, written throughout the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Because other robot stories and essays followed it, its name has not remained accurate: still, the book constitutes the sizable bulk of his robot short fiction, including the Susan Calvin stories and classics like “Robbie”.

The stories vary slightly in setting, but cover the latter half of the 20th century and human history throughout the 21st, until the dawn of hyperdrives that allow for interstellar travel. Most of the stories share a same canon: at some point in the late 20th or early 21st century,  the many political entities on Earth unite under a weak confederation. Essential parts of the economic (agriculture, for instance) are planned, and crucial to the planning are large computers. These globe-monitoring computing machines in the style of UNIVAC may be subsidiaries to Multivac — a massive supercomputer at least the size of a building. Several stories here concern Multivac, the machine that bears all the cares of humanity upon its transistor- and vacuum-tube employing shoulders.

Robots in the style of Commander Data come later: while designed to emulate human beings in essential form and size, they exist chiefly for industrial work or for the amusement of wealthy individuals. The people of Earth later react against the employment of robots in this way, relegating them to maintaining space posts in a dozen or so of the stories here. Three stories follow Mike Donovan and Gregory Powell, two quality-assurance technicians in the employ of US Robots and Mechanical Men, as they observe the latest robot models at work, “manning” the stations that beam intense sunlight to Earth, powering its electric grid. Later on, robots nearly vanish from Earth history altogether: in the Empire age, only humans who have left Earth to colonize other worlds use robots. Little of the Empire age is seen here, though — only its prelude in a short story about detectives Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw, the latter being what we call today an android.

Asimov’s stories are as ever simple and charming. They bear the mark of the fifties and sixties, not only in their portrayal of marriage (husband goes to work, wife keeps house), but in the way they grapple with the future. Some predictions seem banal by modern standards, others still far off and bordering on fantastic — but the optimism and hope are undeniable. Asimov is refreshing and endearing, and the retro-feel has its own appeal to me. The Complete Robot is a solid hit, taking me back to that summer in which I first delighted in Asimov’s short stories. I definitely recommend it.

Highlights:

  • “Sally”, a favorite of mine about automated cars with personalities.
  • “True Love”, in which a computer designed to find its maker the perfect match finds his own.
  • “The Tercentenary Incident”, set on 4 July 2076, follows the aftermath of an attempted assassination of the US President. The assassins seemed to have only vaporized the president’s android decoy — but who can know that that puff of atoms following the disintegration blast belonged to an android, and not to an unpopular president?
  • “Reason”, in which quality-assurance technicians struggle with the first sentient robot after it establishes a religion based on the worshiping the station which it was designed to serve. 
  • “Mirror Image”, an unexpected treat featuring the Robots trilogy team of Elijah Baley and Daneel Olivaw as they attempt to settle a matter of academic fraud.
  • “The Bicentennial Man” follows a robot’s quest for humanity. Watching the Robin Williams movie of this prompted me to read The Positronic Man back in high school, my first involvement with Asimov. The link leads to the trailer.

“To those of you who have read some (or, possibly, all) of my robot stories before, I welcome your loyalty and patience. To those of you who have not, I hope this book has given you pleasure — and I’m pleased to have met you — and I hope we meet again soon.” – p. 683, ‘the last word’.

Indeed, Dr. A.

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