Can't think what to get me for Christmas?

You're wracking your brains: not socks again, not the latest J K Rowling/Nigella/Lee Child, not the Tiffany diamond tiara even if I would look FAB in it.

Let me help you out: if you can't think what to possibly get me, how about this boxed set from The Residents? The fridge would be nice, but, well, if you really love me...

I, Robot - part 3: Runaround

This is more like it. This is the type of story I remember from my teens, one that depends on a bit of hard science and a subtle understanding of the Three Laws of Robotics. It’s set on a mining base on Mercury and stars two plucky scientists and an out of control robot. It’s a problem story a rather brilliant Boys’ Own yarn for geeks where the characters win-through with careful logic and cool patience even in the face of death.

Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan have been despatched to Mercury to resurrect an abandoned mine. On arrival they discover that the ‘photo-cell banks’ that protect the mining base from the glaring sun are shot and they’ll need selenium to get them running. Fortunately there are naturally occurring open pools of it dotted around the planet surface nearby, so Donovan sends their robot – SPD-1, or Speedy – out to get some.

Of course, Speedy doesn’t come back, and the reason is a conflict between the Second and Third Laws of Robotics.

I, Robot - part 2: Robbie

This story reminds me of nothing so much as some kind of cosy narrative about race relations that you might encounter in pre-civil rights era America. What Asimov appears to have done here is write a charming narrative about a young girl called called Gloria Weston and her coloured nursemaid, and then replaced with the nursemaid with a robot.

The plot goes like this: Gloria’s mother disapproves of her spending all her time with her robot playmate, the titular Robbie. She says: ‘I won’t have my daughter entrusted to a machine. It has no soul and no one knows what it may be thinking. A child just isn’t made to be guarded by a thing of metal.’

George Weston protests that Gloria loves Robbie, and is in no danger: ‘He’s the best darn robot money can buy and I’m damned sure he set me back half a year’s income. He’s worth it, though – darn sight cleverer than half my office staff.’ This makes the relationship entirely clear. Robbie’s a chattel that George Weston values in material terms: he’s a slave.

I, Robot - part 1: Introduction

NB: I do eventually get to I, Robot!

Don’t you ever ask yourself, ‘how did I get here from there?’ It’s one of my favourite trains of thought, lying awake when sleep seems far away and the dark is haunted by familiar things made weird by night. At those times, it’s hard to disagree with Blur – Modern Life Is Rubbish. We’re killing each other and killing the planet all in the name of X-Factor, Vodafone, News International, amazon, Starbucks and Google.

Sci fi was supposed to be the bulwark against all of this. We had 1984 but we’ve still got China, North Korea and all those former Soviet states that cling to the an aging Stalin-lite in order to avoid civil war. We had The Handmaid’s Tale, but we still got Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. We had Mad Max and Robocop but still we got Putin’s Russia. We had The Space Merchants, but still got all this.

In the meantime, we also had The Martian Chronicles, but we got no mission to Mars. We had Rendezvous with Rama, but Rama never showed up. We had The Lensman, and Foundation and Dune and God knows how many more, but popular space travel seems unlikely to ever be possible.

And of course, we had I, Robot but we got no robots.

Reading log - Q3

Here we are again, and me much delayed. Unfortunately I’ve had a few other things on. I was busy with my Marvel Essential Warlock series – which belongs properly in Q4 – and wrote a review of The Fractal Prince, the sequel to The Quantum Thief, which belongs also in Q4. Plus, of course, the perennial nuisance of DIY.

I have been reading, though, and in the three months to 30 September, I read:

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce

The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen

A few John Service stories by Algernon Blackwood

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Marvel Essential Super Villain Team-Up vol 1 by various.

The Fractal Prince

My review of The Fractal Prince is now available at The Zone. It's a sequel to The Quantum Thief, which I reveiwed in 2010.

I’m beginning to worry that I am losing my edge. This is the second review in a row where I’ve cut a lot of negative commentary after I felt that it left a bad taste in a review that I wanted to feel largely positive. It’s an argument between the head and the heart that still feels unresolved. Intellectually I admire hugely what Rajaniemi’s doing. If more SF writers had his ambition and steel-eyed commitment to an individual vision, rather than pleasing SF fans, then I’d be a happy reader, and probably read a lot more SF.

Unfortunately, deep in my guts, I didn’t really enjoy this book.

Marvel Essential Warlock part 13

Marvel Team-Up #55, The Avengers Annual #7, Marvel Team-Up Annual #2

As with the last time around, Warlock is reduced again to conducting the final episodes of his story in the pages of comics. It begins with Marvel Team-Up #55. This is one of those books that takes a popular character and has a revolving cast of guest stars around them, in this case Spidey and in this issue Warlock. 

We still see this today at Marvel – Spidey is the sauce that goes with everything.