I’ve read this book a few times, but honestly the Foundation TV series has left me with a new enthusiasm to re-read some Asimov stuff. I have previously read the entire extended multi-author series, and honestly a fair few of them sucked — especially the ones by other authors — so this time I have the luxury of being a bit more picky. Worse, Asimov remixed the robot stories several times into various volumes, and it can be quite confusing. The Complete Robot contains all the robot stories, and replaces I, Robot (reading one, reading two), The Rest of the Robots; Robot Dreams; and Robot Visions. It also contains a couple of previously unpublished stories.
Most recently I read the stories in 2019, where I found its 1950s treatment of gender issues a bit concerning. I did not have such concerns in 2012 when I was more focused on how the lack of monetary inflation in the book dated it (among other things). This time around, I made it exactly one page into I, Robot before finding a new way that the book is showing its age — it immediately comments that an important part of robot design is that you be able to predict the behaviour of the machine. This is an interesting point in these days of widespread unpredictable and hallucinating generative AI models. We still have a long way to go it seems. There are of course other ways the book has aged — wire recorders, the lack of ubiquitous computing, the dates! However, it seems petty to begrudge Asimov those for a book which is having its 75th birthday this year.
Overall I’d say my 2025 take on The Complete Robot is that it is definitely dated although many of the stories are still good. I cringe at the descriptions of Susan Calvin as loveless because she doesn’t have a partner, and the story with curing Autism as a central plot line made me deeply uncomfortable. This book however is a product of its time I suppose.
My other criticism is that the book is too long. Sure its a collection of short stories, but some of them are better than others and a big more vigor in the curation process would have produced a better read. This book took so long to read because there were definitely periods where I struggled to be motivated to read more because the characters simply weren’t interesting.
Robots
1982
688
