More On Asimov

(With regards to yesterday's post-I've really just had kind of a rough month. Today I got into a fight with a tree. The tree lost, but I took a beating, too.)

I've read a fair number of Isaac Asimov's works lately. (Some posts I've made that focus on Asimov and his work can be found here, here, here, and here. Really ought to implement a tag.) One of the rather interesting things about his "robot series," especially as presented in his somewhat later works, is how he treats robots-as minor gods.

It's actually a reasonable thing to do, all things considered. In his stories, robots gradually gained more and more abilities, including increasingly human forms, immortality (well, this was an early one that a few gave up, the point of the story The Bicentennial Man), telepathy, and eventually time travel.

This last eventually was decided to have been of grand importance in Asimov's galactic history stories, i.e. the Foundation stories. As it happens, a particularly powerful group of time-traveling and telepathic robots ensured that humanity would always be protected (as per the Zeroth Law of Robotics) by manipulating time so that no other intelligent life would ever develop in the galaxy. In Asimov's other later Foundation-based work, he even revealed that Hari Seldon, the psychohistorian whose work created the Foundation, had been funded and protected by a robot who had infiltrated the old Empire's court (he had figured it out himself, as I recall, and later helped this robot deflect a defamation campaign accusing him of being a robot without him having to lie about it, since he was programmed not to lie), and had another robot (whom he seemingly suspected but never accused, and indeed, as she was his wife he probably would have prefered her to have been human) as a bodyguard.

Then, there's Janet Asimov's Norby. Having read on Wikipedia that Norby was Janet Asimov's character and his stories were mostly written by her merely confirms what I suspected-otherwise (no offense really intended to either Asimov) his work would have seemed to decline a bit.

Norby's fun if pointless, I'll admit. It's full of interesting ideas, too. But... yeah, not really as impressive as Asimov's other works.

-Signing off.