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Asimov Estate Authorizes New I, Robot Books
daria42 writes "In a move guaranteed to annoy long-term science fiction fans, the estate of legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov, who passed away in 1992, has authorized a trilogy of sequels to his beloved I, Robot short story series, to be written by relatively unknown fantasy author Mickey Zucker Reichert. The move is already garnering opposition online. 'Isaac Asimov died forty years after they were first written. If he had wanted to follow them up, he would have. The author's intentions need to be respected here,' writes sci-fi/fantasy book site Keeping the Door."
Probably too late for that. Sigh :(
If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
... this is just _wrong_!
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
If you dont like the books, dont f**king read them.
If they dont fit into your world of I, Robot books then dont include them.
What kind of elitist crap is that? I love Asimov's books, I have read most of them and they probably helped shape me in a way. I say that if someone wants to have a go at some sequels the go right a head. I don't think that they will be even comparable but I might enjoy them anyway. The worst thing that can happen is that they are not worth reading.
The author's intentions need to be respected here.
The author no longer exists, and therefore cannot possibly have intentions.
That said, this kind of posthumous sequel is almost always a disaster, but that's only a problem for the people who read them. If the idea bugs you at all, rest assured that you are bothered infinitely more than the original author is.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
ummmm... Frank's own sequels to "Dune" were spotty. So, at least the other authors were following the pattern.
-k
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
No-one knows jack about AI.. most can't even define it.
And if you thought his books were about AI, you completely missed the point.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The travesty here isn't that someone is writing sequels to the original series. The travesty is that his heirs still have a monopoly on the series, 57 years later.
People writing sequels to books is the right for society to continue to enrichen our culture. Regardless of the quality of the works that will be produced, society grows by garnering inspiration and aid from past works. I'm sure Shakespeare has inspired and helped many a person in learning the trade of creating stories. The tragedy here is that companies like Disney reap all of the benefits of the public domain, while ensuring very little will ever be added back to it.
Before I get attacked by those who believe you have a right for all time to your ideas, this is a modern construct. Society managed to survive millenia without the damn thing. And as someone who seeks to earn their living in the software industry, I would quite happily place my work in the public domain voluntarily after a period of 25 years.
My AI course teacher said that AI was whatever we hadn't figured out to do with computers yet.
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them? --Abraham Lincoln
A few select pieces of timeline:
_I, Robot_, 1950.
_Foundation_, 1951.
_Foundation's Edge_, 1982.
_Robots and Empire_, 1985.
_Foundation and Earth_, 1986.
Author's death, 1992.
It seems obvious he felt it entirely possible to follow up with a book 30 years after beginning, and it is certainly true that he didn't feel Robots were finished off as a body of story 35-36 years after beginning (Foundation and Earth is arguably a Robots novel). If he had lived another 40 years beyond 1986 and not touched the universe, then I think we could have argued about original intentions. Passing a mere 6 years after the last entries, however, tells us nothing about his true intent, or how it would change after decades of pondering his creations.
Of course, being revisionist in assessing his intent is a bit clever, isn't it? Seeing as how many times he revised his own plans, thoughts and plot/ story/ time lines.
It's true that there's more to these stories than "AI". (Notice the similarity between the social role of robots in some stories and the humiliations inflicted at that time on African-Americans.) But the AI part is important. Asimov was a "hard" SF writer — he didn't pull the science out of his ass, not even the imaginary science.
Here are some examples: there's "Runaround," where a robot behaves strangely because of a conflict between the second and third law. Then there's "Little Lost Robot" where the robot behaves strangely because of a modified first law. Then there's "Reason" where a robot behaves strangely after inventing its own cosmology. Then there's "Liar!" where a psychic robot behaves strangly because of a conflict between normal honesty and the first law.
Do you see a common thread here? Oh yes, and Susan Calvin, the most important character in these stories, is an expert on robot behavior.
Defining "artificial intelligence" isn't hard: it's about intelligence (and thus behavior) in artificial systems — such as robots. It is true that AI has made very little progress towards understanding how intelligence works and actually creating an artificial equivalent of natural intelligence. But that's precisely why Asimov's stories are dated. Because we now know that creating a machine that can hold a conversation with humans, make moral judgments, and act rationally in complicated situations is a lot harder than he assumed it was.
Why all the boo hoos.... Just don't read them if you don't like it. There are bunches of Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Dr Who... Heck there are books about video games... And you guys are crying about a few books about robots. Get a life!
Oh grow up. If you can't disagree with somebody without being an asshole, don't expect anybody to care about your opinions.
And believe it or not, there's an attitude towards Asimov that's somewhere between hero worship and total contempt.
While all of the stories in I Robot were first written 40 years before his death, Issac's positronic robots, and the three laws were something that he kept coming back to, time and again, throughout his career writing SF. His last works of fiction tied his earlier robot and Foundation stories together into one shared continuity. He clearly did not believe that he had written the last definitive word on the subject.
I am willing to give the new stories the benefit of the doubt. I won't declare them awful, until I've actually had the opportunity to read them.
But using the same names and situations pretending that the author would have so wished is unethical and immoral.
This would be the case regardless of how long copyright was, what makes it worst is that current copyright terms mean that is money not talent, what decides which new vision gets done.
Wanting to have saner, much shorter copyright terms is not opposed (and I for one frankly fail to see where you are finding the irony) to call a cynic money grab for what it really is.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
He died forty years after they were written. If copyright law were at all sane, there would be no need for "authorization", and there would already be 500 sequels, some of which might be good. A dead guy's intentions regarding old books should not be the concern of anyone other than someone studying literature.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Come on, it's the same thing every time a book (or anything) is adapted into a movie or has sequels or whatever! Everybody is making a scene of it! (I remember giant trolls about P. Jackson's LoTR...) The *original* books of Asimov won't disappear anyway! The additional fiction won't make it change. The upcoming book might be enjoyable, faithful to Asimov, or not. And what if they don't? Will that change the face of the earth? Will that change the vision of Asimov's work in you heart? Nobody force you to read them, and nobody says "now, that's the official truth, robots are made of cheese and actually work for R. What Ismyname, the super demonic robot from oblivion. Just discard everything you knew about robots" If you're not happy with what is added to the original work that you enjoy, just ignore it! Last week I was at the Surrogates movie premiere in Paris, and the two authors of the graphic novel where there to answer questions from the audience. When asked if they were happy about the adaptation, they answered that they did enjoy it (well, that's what they say in public :P but that's not the matter here) and they said that whatever could happen with the movie, their own work wouldn't be altered, since it follows its own path, it was there before the movie.
The first book was the old legend of a dragon guarding the treasure, with some social commentary about OPEC (CHOAM) thrown in. It was not particularly original, but it was very well written. Dune Messiah begins to tell the story of what happens next - you've made this person a hero, all powerful, and emperor of the universe, and that's usually where stories end, but what happens to him after that? Children of Dune is where I think the series reached a peak. This dispenses with the 'good versus evil' ideas from the first two and gives all of the characters real motivations and is strongly inspired by Machiavelli's ideas that it's easier to do evil when you are perceived as good and vice versa.
God Emperor was very different. I see God Emperor as a prequel to the next three (sadly, only two of which were ever written). It set the scene, but it also tidied up some lose ends. This is where you finally see the conclusion of the Butlerian Jihad. In the first three books, people are still frightened of thinking machines. Before the jihad, people delegated their thinking to machines and became less than human in the process. In God Emperor, humanity has evolved to the point where it is no longer a threat. This point seemed to be completely missed by Kevin and Brian, who thought that evil robots made a good enemy.
The next two books are build up to a finale that was never written. This is a shame. They set the scene, dropping hints all the way through that the old empire is a side show. There are hints that the genetic engineers from the Tleilaxu scattering have created some forms of post humans and that the current humans are losing an evolutionary battle, but Frank Herbert died before he could develop this. I imagine that Dune 7 would have spent more time, like some of the early ones, examining what the essential components of humanity really are. The two face dancers that make brief appearances in Chapter House, and maybe Duncan and Sheena, would probably be revealed to embody these qualities while the Honoured Matres and the ones that they are fleeing from do not, but I don't really know how he would have developed thee themes. I'd love to see the notes that he left. I can't imagine that he'd bring back thinking machines as an enemy after Leto II's comments in God Emperor about how foolish it was to fear them.
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Asimov created an interesting concept, and he didn't fully explore it - so why shouldn't others write stories in the same universe? I see lots of stories around about orcs and elves, clearly based on Tolkien's universe; most are crap, but some aren't, and I think it is a good thing if people are inspired by an author.
What I find distasteful is that somebody is supposed to sort of write in the same style as the original author; it just doesn't work, and apart from that, I don't really think Asimov was a greatwriter from a literary point of view. His style seems stiff and awkward to me, where to me, good literature should be a joy read even after decades or centuries.