Content here is by Michael Still, mikal@stillhq.com.
This book is actually the best one of the two robot city series (Robot City and Robots and Aliens). Unfortunately I had to wade through 12 not very good books to find it, and its still not stellar. I’d recommend giving both these series a miss unless you’re obsessed with completeness in Asimov’s Robot universe….
These are books written in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Universe by Roger MacBride Allen. These books are actually better than the Robot City Series, in that they at least explore issues that Asimov himself touched upon. 1997: Caliban 1998: Inferno 1999: Utopia
These are books written in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Universe by other authors. They don’t progress the overall plot of the Foundation series, they just use some of the concepts and characters to tell similar stories. The books in the series are: 1987: Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Odyssey by Michael P Kube-McDowell 1987: Isaac Asimov’s Robot…
I was excited when I found Foundation’s Friends the other day, because I thought I’d read all the Foundation books and did not know that this one existed. It is an anthology which celebrates Asimov’s 50 years as a science fiction author, and each author takes their own approach to the Foundation universe. The stories…
Last night Doug made up the first cut of the PCB for the beer fridge controller mentioned in previous posts, and we fitted the arduino to it. There wasn’t much in the way of software changes, apart from changing the pin that the compressor runs on. You can see here that we’ve mounted both the…
Further to yesterday’s post about the beer fridge thermostat replacement, I’ve been hacking on ethernet support for the controller. This is handy because I’d like to log the temperature and compressor state over the network, because I’m hoping that can be used to make calculations about the thermal mass of the contents of the fridge,…
On the weekend I picked up a 220 liter beer fridge for $20. Its in really good condition (ignoring some minor rust in the freezer section), and the only real problem with it is that the thermostat doesn’t work leaving the compressor on the whole time. Doug suggested that instead of just buying a new…
I had trouble getting really into this book, although the story was interesting. I guess its mostly the Gibson-esque descriptions of a future world with plenty of assumed knowledge. However, I found the descriptions of the failed Mars missions deeply satisfying, and would love to see those covered in more detail. However, the story gets…
This book is a return to the short story collection style of Bolo book, with all of these short stories being written by David Webber. Unfortunately, most of these stories are not new: “Miles to Go” and “A brief technical history of the Bolo” appeared in Bolos 3: The Triumphant, and “The Traitor” and “A…
This is Doug Naylor’s first solo book, after the breakup of his Red Dwarf partnership with Rob Grant. This book deviates pretty wildly from the plot line developed by the TV series, although it does use some of the ideas from the series. Often these ideas are used in such a different way that it…