dsr_ 10 months 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.

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  • a_bonobo 10 months 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.

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beacon294 10 months 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.

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  • rusticpenn 10 months 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

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    • beacon294 10 months ago

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

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ghaff 10 months ago

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

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