name: I_Robot isbn: 0553803700 title: I, Robot author: Isaac Asimov publisher: Doubleday year: 1950 start: 2004-07-03 stop: 2004-10-07
Isaac Asimov's seminal novel about robots and how they behave. This is a collection of short stories that document the evolution of robotic technology in the world of tomorrow and the societal changes they trigger.
I started reading it in preparation for the movie, knowing full well that the movie has nothing to do with the book, except for the title. I had bought the novel a long time ago, because it's a classic, and figured I'd read it someday. So that day has finally come.
The book is a collection of short stories that were published between 1940 and 1950. In is interesting to see how the author looked at political development in the future, how in the end, there is a large russo-american block that dominates the planet and an old, decadent Europe that is now good for nothing. Luckily, things didn't pan out that way (yet), but it gives us an insight in how they saw the world back then and where they saw it going. It is also curious how to them, atomic energy would become ubiquitous in the future, like in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.