Play Book Tag discussion

I started this as an ebook and switched over to audio about halfway through. I was not enjoying the beginning as I read it in print. When I found the audio read by Scott Brick, I went that route. Scott is one of my favorite narrators.

The beginning was a bit startling. Since the book was written in the 1950s, the future was 1990s! By then, according to Asimov's story we have sky cars and robot nannies. That is laughable from the 2020s for sure.

The book seemed like a bunch of linked short stories, and, in my research, I found that they were published as short magazine stories. The linking was pretty good, especially in the middle to later part of the book. Asimov carried some of the same characters from story to story. I didn't like two of the characters, robot scientists Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan. This was in the part where I was reading the text, and they were just at each other's throats, it seemed. When I switch to Scott Brick's reading, they get a bit more humanity!

I thought it was pretty amazing that Asimov came up with the three laws of robotics; it seems like any book about robots seems to embrace the same laws. I liked the character of Susan Calvin the robot psychologist. She was brilliant when it came to understanding the three laws and how the robots interpreted them. When there was a glitch, it was Susan to the rescue. As the stories continued and Susan aged, I wondered how the Robot in society and the human society were going to survive. The morals and ethics are things we will need to address in this day and age of AI.

All in all, an interesting read and a precursor of the science fiction of today.