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limatau's review against another edition
adventurous
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Misogyny
Moderate: Sexism and Xenophobia
Minor: Slavery
lukerik's review against another edition
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
A particularly well done sequel, picking up the theme of slavery from The Caves of Steel and running with it, and picking up the universe he created and playing with it.
So here we are on Solaria, a sort of garden world on which the inhabitants, all of them rich, are pampered by a vast number of robots. At one point Baley interviews a Solarian sociologist. A very amusing scene which satirises the structuralist approach to sociology, ie, come up with a theory and bend everything you know to support it without actually doing any field research. The sociologist asks if Baley knows which old earth culture Solaria resembles. Of course, the first thing that springs to mind is the plantation economy of the Southern US states. His answer of Sparta got a laugh out of me, but it opens up a second theme of the robot as a weapon and there’s an interesting examination of the hidden subtleties of the Laws of Robotics. If we invert them to the Laws of Humanity I suppose we would have:
1. A human must protect it’s own existence.
2. A human must obey the orders given it by another human except when those orders conflict with the first law.
3. A human must not harm another human, or through inaction allow another human to come to harm, except when that conflicts with the first or second laws.
But this of course leaves no room for altruism and it doesn’t account for the guilt of obeying the first law in preference to the third. And in the same way that our conscience can hurt us, so can robots be hurt when the two-way interdependencies of the laws are revealed in what at first seems to be a linear system.
Also, Solaria is actually the counterpart of the Earther’s current culture. Both have walked into a dead evolutionary end and neither can leave the wombs they have created for themselves. Both are slaves to their own minds. Clever writing.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racial slurs and Slavery