beacon294 a year ago

What do you mean? All I read was foundation, some non fiction, and robot short story collections.

  • cafard a year ago

    I did read one out-and-out crime novel by Azimov. You will not be surprised to learn that the victim was graduate student in chemistry, the murder occurred in a laboratory, and the plot twist turned on something known chiefly to chemists.

    (I've forgotten the title--I read the book nearer 50 than 40 years ago.)

    Edit: I see from Wikipedia that it was The Death Dealers, later republished as A Whiff of Death.

  • dr_dshiv a year ago

    He used the detective/crime dialogue format to deliver sci-fi.

  • rusticpenn a year ago

    Are you being sarcastic? The Robot novels are basically crime novels with robots...

    • dsr_ a year ago

      It'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 a year ago

        And 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 a year ago

      There'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 a year ago

        I 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 a year ago

          Yeah I didn't really think of those as detective stories but it has been a few decades.

    • ghaff a year ago

      Also the Black Widower stories. I'm sure others as well.

  • cafard a year ago

    I did read one out-and-out crime novel by Asimov. You will not be surprised to learn that the victim was graduate student in chemistry, the murder occurred in a laboratory, and the plot twist turned on something known chiefly to chemists.

    (I've forgotten the title--I read the book nearer 50 than 40 years ago.)