The final installment of the Robot series. Again human and robot detectives Elijah Bailey and R. Daneel Olivaw are sent to solve a murder. Although it again expertly combines detective story and SF, this is the least suspenseful of the series to me. Still very good, of course... ( )

Since his trip off-world to the planet Solaria, plainclothesman Elijah Baley has founded a group of people who go outside the cities in their spare time. Although he still finds being outside difficult, he hopes that the younger members of the group, such as his son Bentley will one day get the chance to settle on another planet.

Since he has been trying unsuccessfully to get permission to travel to the planet Aurora, Elijah Baley is pleased to be summoned there to find out who 'killed' a humaniform robot, and he is even happier to meet up with his old friend R. Daneel Olivaw again. But the case has political ramifications, and failure to clear Hans Fastolfe's name could mean that Earthmen will never get the chance to live on other worlds. ( )

A robot/scifi mystery. Lije Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw must travel far from Earth to solve a robot related mystery. Exactly what happened on Aurora? A fun exploration of the relation of human to robot and the 3 Laws of Robotics. ( )

This book is the third in the third in the Robot mystery series, and is once again set on a Spacer world. This one was written 30 years after the first two, and Asimov's style has noticeably changed between the 1950s and 1980s.

The book starts off slowly, with a lecturing tone which I found quite annoying. For example, devoting an entire page to a discussion of whether the deliberate death of a a robot (even a human shaped on) is murder. Often the first part of the book feels like it is going excessively slowly.

However, its only the first third of so of the book which suffers this flaw. Its as if Asimov realized after a while that he also had a story to tell, and got on with it. The book then improves massively and has a good story.

So, overall I liked this book, although the first part of the book wasn't as good as the rest of the Asimov I've read.

http://www.stillhq.com/book/Isaac_Asi... ( )

This is the third of the Elijah Baley/R. Daneel Olivaw murder mystery novels, and the one that opened the door for connecting the robot series with the Foundation series. It is better than many of the Robot-Foundation crossovers, though the crime to be solved also probably the weakest of the three Robot mysteries, but contains a frightening depiction of the dysfunctional spacer society.

The mystery at the heart of the book concerns the destruction of the human form robot Jander on the planet Aurora. Once again, Lige Baley is teamed with Olivaw to hunt down the culprit, but the mystery serves mostly as a vehicle to explore the oddity of the spacer culture. Once on the outwardly utopian Aurora, Lige delves further into dysfunctional nature of spacer society revealed in The Naked Sun. Gladia, introduced in The Naked Sun, turns out to be Jander's owner, and is so distanced from human contact that she took Jander as her lover and "husband". The murder mystery leads Lige into Auroran politics, featuring a struggle between Aurorans who believe that colonizing the galaxy is their destiny, and others opposed to such a goal.

Along the way, Lige discovers attempts to construct further human form robots to further the goal of colonizing the galaxy, the seeds of the idea that will be developed by Hari Seldon as psychohistory, and a love triangle. The intersection of these elements, especially the attempts to construct human form robots without the assistance of the one roboticist who knows the secret of their construction, proves to be the thread that ties together the answer to the mystery. Unfortunately, the answer, and Baley's handling of the dénouement of the book is mostly just a set up for the various Foundation-Robot crossovers that came later.

The weakness of this book is not necessarily contained in the story or characters in the book, but the implications that the story has for other Asimov works. The introduction of psychohistory here, thousands of years before Seldon, lessens the "revolutionary" insight that got Seldon arrested and put on trial in Foundation. The introduction of Olivaw and Giskard as more or less benevolent robot-gods shepherding humanity through a crisis begins the process that ends with the omniscient robot guardian of Foundation and Earth. While the story contained within the book itself is well-crafted, the connections it makes with other works serves only to cheapen them. ( )