Buy: I, Robot on Amazon
I picked this book up out of my pile of books waiting to be read on a whim. I remembered vaguely watching a Will Smith movie by the same name and thought, hm.. this could be a fun, easy read. Boy was I wrong.
It was fun! That I will say. Easy however, it was not. This book really made me think.
First of all, this is a story about robots and their effect on the futuristic world (which in itself is pretty funny considering it begins in 1996 and the things being written about have yet to come to pass). But that description is of the story at its most basic.
The first story being told in the book gripped me. The love a child has for a non-speaking robot nanny. But it didn’t set the stage well for the story that followed after – not to say I didn’t enjoy it, I just.. went into the book after that opening expecting something different. What I got was a harsh jolt of reality, a lot of science and multiple brain-teasing puzzles. Once I got over the initial shock I began to really enjoy myself, but had to stop several times to digest what I was reading and think it over.
This book is told in a very journalistic style, which makes sense as the stories being told are being told to someone asking questions about them. It’s not a warm, fuzzy feel-good type of story. It’s cold and harsh at points and it fully lays open the flaws of humanity. Being human means despite good intentions, you can bring destruction in every sort of form, from physical to mental to spiritual. And the scenarios in this book really took me to those places and made me think hard.
