When Elizabeth first brought back this book from her library, I thought I have read it in the far off days while borrowing books for my eldest who likes science fiction. But it was not so. The stories are so original and unusual that if I have read them before, I would never forget them completely.
Robbie reminds me of the many infants in my country who are cared for by foreign maids for many years. There must be cases where the maid loves the child and the child reciprocates the love. Then the cessation of employment would cut the bond just like that. The maid would fly home and then there would be no contact between the child and the maid who has been a major part of the child's life. Gloria was fortunate that her father brought the robot into her life again until she was ready to let him go and be scrapped.
In Runaround the two field engineers almost died by giving non-specific instruction to their robot that caused him to go round and round the pool of selenium which was badly needed for battery repair. It is a good thing that they are resourceful and clever to turn things around.
We read in Reason that one robot was intelligent enough to see that human are weaker than robots and look to another big machinery as the creator. Interestingly it was good enough to perform what to men as the critical and difficult task as beaming high energy back to earth in a interstellar storm.
Robot technology was advanced enough in Catch the Rabbit that a main robot was in charged of six robots. It became the test engineers' headache that the team of robots seemed to go AWOL whenever there was a minor emergency. It took insight for one engineer to shoot one of the subsidiary robot to solve the design flaw.
Who would have thought that the one robot who could read human minds would be one who would lie in order not to hurt the human masters. "Liar!" ended up in an endless loop of heads he lose and tails others win that he collapsed from a dilemma so bad that he destroyed himself.
My favorite story is Little Lost Robot. Who would have thought that robots would mind curses and swearing and then took the frustrating phrase of go get lost literally? It took Dr. Susan Calvin quite many days to trick this intelligent yet proud robot into revealing itself for destruction.
There are three more stories after this, they are in a sense different from the top few stories.
No comments:
Post a Comment