Maravillosos los cuentos, maravillosos los ensayos. ( )

Isaac Asimov, creador de la palabra robótica, nos ofrece treinta y sies relatos cortos y ensayos sobre robots. Este libro extraordinario resume medio siglo de pensamiento acerca de los robots y la robótica. Desde el mismo Robbie hasta los relatos de Susan Calvin, la primera robopsicología, pasando por Stephen Byerley, el robot humanoide, y el equipo de detectives formado por un hombre y un robot, Lije Bayley y Daneel Olivaw.

The man likes robots
and loves tooting his own horn
I guess he's earned it. ( )

This collection of Asimov's deathless Robot series, shorter works that add up to a guiding vision of what Humanity strives for in the creation of a computerized mechanical slave class, starts with an essay entitled "The Robot Chronicles." As I assume most everyone reading Asimov in this day and time is reasonably familiar with the stories that make up the series, I'll confine my observations to the essay which is not otherwise available in print, though it exists on audio for your edification.

Asimov, a lecherous old hump with a *terrible* (richly deservedly so) reputation among female fandom, made some conceptual leaps in his career that have remained extremely relevant to the modern world. His centenary was this past second of January. His reputation is such that the jollifications in fandom were...muted. This is understandable, even laudable, but still regrettable. The Three Laws of Robotics, with which his essay deals in a way I did not expect, alone should guarantee his place on the podium of Authors of Merit. But as sensitivity and awareness and the need for all of us to do better now that we know better are in operation, there must needs be a period of desuetude for famous offenders against our new order.

Nothing will knock his contributions out of use. His name will, whether temporarily or permanently, be expunged from the common usage of the robotics conversation (or so I predict). But he remains the originator of the modern technical and social conception of the Robot.

This essay is a personal history of how and why and who and what led Isaac Asimov to develop the Laws, the concept of the robot that he adopted and adapted so thoroughly from [author:Karel Čapek|439723]'s 1920 play [book:R.U.R.|6589334], and the enduring trope of the machine that longs to be human. (No, he was not the first to bring that idea to the table. Please spare me comments about Galatea and other inanimate objects of personification. They are all stipulated as predecessors to Asimov's creation and influences thereon, conscious or unconscious, herewith.) As a personal essay reflecting on Asimov's reasons for and responses to his robotics work, I found the half-hour or so of reading deeply pleasurable.

Not five-star's worth, though. I found a smugness, arguably earned, in his telling (retelling, more like, since he had given this text as talks over the years he was lionized) that is a fundamentally squicky emotion for me. I don't think anyone really intelligent is ever free of smugness. I also think it ill becomes the intelligent not to include some self-deprecation in their smugness, some overt and clear signal that they understand and are sorry for the feeling of irritation and annoyance their (however well-earned) expertise elicits in the hearer/reader. Asimov does not do that here...his response, for example, to the OFTEN brought charge that Roddenberry used Asimov's Bicentennial Man as source material for Lt. Cmdr. Data: "I didn't mind."

Aren't you kind.

Still, there it is. Along with being a handsy old letch he was an arrogant bastard. And a genius at some things (though not particularly at the *craft* of writing). And a light gone out too soon. He was a stripling of seventy-two when he died, and I for one would give a not-very-affordable decade off my life to hear what he'd have to say about the modern world.

If you don't want to read his Robot stories, listen to the essay on audio. But I think you'll want to read them once you do. ( )

A ton of short stories by one of the best that ever put words to the page. ( )