Released July 2008 (Robot Binaries & Press) * 408 pages * ISBN 13: 9781894689069
There is a lot of technical information in I, robot. In fact, the very first sentence in the book is followed by an abstract for a patent application for isotope separation. That’s a risky approach when you have mere seconds to sell a reader on your book as they browse the shelves.
The author seems knowledgeable of robotics and artificial intelligence, but much of the information is imparted to the reader in lecture- or presentation-format between characters. I would have found the robots just as convincing with less information and fewer diagrams to interrupt the flow of the story.
While the robots are convincing, the human characters are more difficult to grow attached to. The protagonist Suzuki Haruto is a rule-follower, which is integral to the book’s message. The point that this is the result of obsessive-compulsive disorder is not made convincingly until about 70 pages into the book, which is late considering the importance of this disorder to the events in the book.
Although there is a lot of action, the tension is defused because each time Haruto gets in a jam his karate or blind luck saves him. He also never suffers the repercussions of being shot a number of times over the course of the book (even after jumping into salt water mere seconds after being wounded there is no mention of pain or discomfort). These are things that I might overlook in a two-hour action movie, but not in a book where I spend several days with the characters.
The other characters in the book are flat. The women are of the I-need-a-man-to-keep-me-safe or I-need-babies-to-make-me-whole (or both) variety. Without background to support these attitudes in these particular characters, these mindsets come off as stereotypes (particularly when they are used for every woman in the book). Haruto has a particularly magnetic effect on one woman that left me flipping the pages to see if I missed something before she stripped naked and invited him “in”. Haruto’s love interest is nice to him, but there is not enough transition between being nice and being naked to make their relationship believable or interesting.
Another stereotype which cropped up repeatedly was that military generals are all overly-patriotic-with-a-quick-temper. Again, while there certainly are people like that in the military, it is not a given. Without the personalities being established I was confused when one general stared choking another in the middle of an argument, and another spontaneously began yelling at a subordinate, threatening him with all sorts of harm. There was no lead up to justify this behaviour from these characters.
Some readers will not care about these issues and some will. If you want to check the book out for yourself, you can download the first nine chapters of the book at Robot Binaries Press.
