This is the kind of
story that made me fall in love with SF the first time around. It’s
focused on a knotty a philosophical dilemma that’s wittily
expressed using a robot as the central actor. The companionable
Donovan and Powell don’t seem to have too many concerns other than
the action of the story. They’re classic capable men bringing order
to the frontier of space, and turning it to their advantage if they
can.
The two are on a space
station orbiting the Sun this time, installing a new
super-intelligent robot that will take control of the energy beam
that shoots power back to Earth. As the story says in the rather
electrifying opening paras: ‘Whatever the background one is face to
face with the inscrutable positronic brain, which the slide-rule
geniuses say should work thus and so. Except that they don’t.’
The opening scene lays
the problem out through a great bit of dialogue between an
exasperated Greg Powell with an infuriatingly obtuse robot. QT-1 –
or ‘Cutie’, as it’s lamely named – doesn’t believe that
Earth and space exist or that the engineers made him. Powell goes to
great lengths to explain the process that led to Cutie being
assembled and activated. Cutie responds, ‘Do you expect me to
believe any such complicated, implausible hypothesis as you have just
outlined? What do you take for?’
This scene does a lot
of work: it directly introduces the central problem, explains the
setting and establishes Cutie’s rather eccentric and not especially
robot like behaviour. The story’s very economical in this way:
Asimov concentrates everything on the robot’s mania, leaving
subtleties of character and textual nuance aside. He’s found a new
and interesting problem and figured out an amusing scenario and
focuses on delivering that.
I’m looking hard to
see if I can discover individual characteristics between Donovan and
Powell, but it’s hard to spot anything. They tend to respond to
problems in the same and speak indistinguishably. And of course,
they’re both over-shadowed by Cutie, who’s amusingly full of
regal scorn for the foolish humans and their silly notions.
The lack of character
in the supposed protagonists isn’t a problem at all, though, in
fact it’s a feature. This is high-octane SF with all the
unnecessary impurities taken out and it’s hugely enjoyable.
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