This is a rare reread for me, which I mean to but rarely do. It's a short, dated-yet-relevant satire on academia & academics, technology, bureaucracy, etc., etc. It's set around the privately sponsored, new ethics wing of a robotics research institute, due to be opened by the Queen. That sets pretty much everything up - and the book is pretty much a brisk romp through the different permutations of personality clashes and misunderstandings that that scenario offers.

There's just enough philosophizing on computer consciousness, and axiomatic ethics, and computer-generated English to give this book more serious literary pretensions than, say, a Tom Sharpe, but I'd say that's the book's closest cousin.

There's a lot to admire and respect in this book, and there's a lot more to enjoy. Overall, the humour can be a little over-egged here and there, and the situations can boil over into farce, but it manages to hold itself up as a slight novel of ideas.
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Not exactly hilarious, but fairly funny. More or less The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sort of humour. ( )

I last read this fifty years ago. I remembered pretty accurately almost everything involving the experiments with ethical robots -- a hilarious set of experiments putting a robot on a sinking raft that has to make a moral choice whether to toss whatever is also on the raft or sacrifice itself. What I remember almost nothing of was the "the queen is coming" plotline and the usual collection of comic characters -- the director who has power but almost no power of speech or thought, the would-be author who spends his entire time writing the book reviews to go on the book's jacket, etc. These are funny and smoothly done, but they lack the ingenuity of the SFnal elements, irrelevant though those elements ultimately are to the plot.

Well-received at the time, still worth a read today. ( )

All you need to know is... this is one of the funniest books ever written. ( )

An hilarious satire. ( )