Sunday, November 23, 2008

"Family Book Club" for December?

As a December Family Book Club endeavor, Jesse suggested we follow up on the time travel theme described by Will in his report on The End of Eternity by Asimov, by perhaps reading another time travel book - October the First is Too Late, by the late, illustrious astronomer Fred Hoyle. The book is interesting (see Amazon reviews), but is out of print and may be hard to get. I did find that our library has one copy, which I reserved, but........

Another possibility is to explore one of Asimov's very interesting Robot books, which probe issues of free will, the nature of intelligence, and man vs. machine. The series starts with The Caves of Steel, which is an excellent story and introduces the wonderful robot R Daneel Olivaw, but is stronger as a science fiction mystery than a consideration of robot vs. man issues. The next in the series is The Naked Sun, also a good mystery. But the third book, The Robots of Dawn, really combines a great mystery story with a fascinating exploration of human-robot interactions - see the reviews on Amazon) - while I think it would probably be best to read these in order, I think it would be fine to start with the third book - that way, we could get the most bang for the book! Thoughts?

1 comment:

  1. Strong preference for _October the First is Too Late_. (Asimov is great, but I've read them all.) It is available used on Amazon for $1 + $4 shipping. Let's decide and we'll buy.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.