This, like the Foundation trilogy, masquerades as a novel but is not, strictly speaking, any such thing. Yet the various short stories are linked together into a kind of narrative by the narrator, with the common themes revolving around Asimov’s famed Three Laws of Robotics.
Yet the whole thing has a kind of coherence, and the short stories are fun to read- revolving, as the do, on the puzzle of how a robot is behaving in a certain way in relation to the Laws.
It’s amusing, of course, to see the course of the twenty-first century as seen from the 1940s. Gender roles are very much as they were. Smoking is ubiquitous. Even in 2052 there are no issues with oil and gas. The “Machines” that control the economy are interesting to contrast with modern computers and AI, and our fears of the Singularity. There is also an annoying and American prejudice in the final story, seeing Europe as old and exhausting. And we end with a dispiriting kind of infantile utopia where the Machines take care of humanity but we have no agency.
For all its flaws, though, and for all its lacking the depth of ideas of Foundation, this is nevertheless an extraordinary novel that develops the idea of the robot in ways that others- including Asimov himself- would go on to push towards bigger and better things.
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