Content here is by Michael Still, mikal@stillhq.com.
Given how disappointed I have been in other books in this series, I was pleasantly surprised by this one. The style is very readable, and the content is interesting. The plot seems more nuanced than some of the others in the series, and the characters aren’t as one dimensional either. This isn’t the best book…
This is the third book in the second Asimov tie in series. Its one of the better ones of the nine I have read so far, and I actually enjoyed reading it (some of the others felt like a bit of a chore). This one covers a return to Robot City, where an outside force…
There are four Asimov books called Nightfall. There is a two volume collection of short stories (Nightfall One and Nightfall Two), a single volume version of this collection, and a novel length version of the short story “Nightfall”, which headlines the short story collections. I’ve previously attempted to explain the list of short stories in…
I was getting quite confused about which robot short stories I had already read (many appear in more than one collection), so I built this table to help. Note that ecrosses indicate stories which aren’t about robots, and are really stow aways. I, Robot 1950 The Rest of the Robots 1964 The Complete Robot 1982…
This book starts poorly, and isn’t as interesting as the previous one in the series (Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Robots and Aliens: Changeling). The introduction uses an alien species with spending any time to describe them, and the process of trying to infer what they are and how they operate distracts from the overall plot….
Despite the rather unwieldy name, and being trapped as the seventh book in a share cropping series using Asimov’s name, this is actually quite a good book. The plot explores something Asimov didn’t do much of (what happens when Asimovian robots meet aliens and define them as human), while not being self righteous about it….
I was pleasantly surprised by this book. I haven’t previously been impressed with Wu’s work, but this book is the best of the Robot City series. The other books suffer from feeling juvenile, whereas this book tells a story without being badly written and boring. Its a shame that you have to wade through the…
This is the fifth book in the Robot City series. I think its actually the best written of those that I have read so far. The story makes sense, isn’t hard to believe like some of the others, and the dialog doesn’t feel wooden. Title: Refuge Author: Rob Chilson Genre: Fiction Release Date: 1988 Pages:…
This is the fourth book in the Robot City series, which is based in Asimov’s Foundation universe. This one follows Odyssey, Suspicion and Cyborg. This book has quite a different style, the robot characters using quite convoluted sentences, which I found annoying. It is a little jarring in this series that each book is by…
This is the third book in the Robot City series, which is based in Asimov’s Foundation universe. This one follows Odyssey and Suspicion, and is a pretty good book. Its also a very fast read. The robot-wandering-the-city subplot is very reminiscent of Caliban, which is yet another Asimov spinoff. The plot lines are different enough…