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Are you being sarcastic? The Robot novels are basically crime novels with robots...
by rusticpenn 2y ago
Are you being sarcastic? The Robot novels are basically crime novels with robots...
- genghisjahn 2y agoAye, the main character is a detective.
- ghaff 2y agoAlso the Black Widower stories. I'm sure others as well.
- dsr_ 2y agoIt's not sarcasm: the conventional wisdom was that an SF novel could not also be a satisfying mystery/detective novel, because the readers could not guess that Aldebaranians can see in ultraviolet, or any other authorial invention. Asimov's insight was that it was up to the author to play rigorously fairly: every fact of consequence needed to be revealed naturally.
- a_bonobo 2y agoAnd that's what I love about the robot stories. He sets up the law of robotics, just like Agatha Christie and friends set up the detective fiction commandments, and then Asimov sets about finding all the loop holes in the laws of robotics. Every story is one loop-hole.
- beacon294 2y agoThere's actually a significant corpus of robot stories. However, I did forget that "I, Robot" does have a lot of crimes, investigations, and such.
- rusticpenn 2y agoI am talking about these for example The Caves of Steel (1954) - first Robot series/R. Daneel Olivaw novel The Naked Sun (1957) - second Robot series/R. Daneel Olivaw novel "Mirror Image" (1972) - short story about R. Daneel Olivaw and detective Elijah Baley The Robots of Dawn (1983) - third Robot series/R. Daneel Olivaw novel Robots and Empire (1985) - fourth Robot series/R. Daneel Olivaw novel
- beacon294 2y agoYeah I didn't really think of those as detective stories but it has been a few decades.