The overall effect is rather middle-of-the-road. “ Lenny" I do not particularly care for “ Robot AL-76 Goes Astray" is mildly amusing (although I enjoyed it much more as a teenager than I do now), and “ Risk" is actually fairly forgettable for some reason. (I'm a sucker for courtroom dramas, and this one is very well done.) I'm also very fond of “ Victory Unintentional" and “ Satisfaction Guaranteed"-the former is one of Asimov’s best attempts at humor, and the latter has a delightful twist to it. (The paperback edition goes in and out of print and was available fairly recently, even if it isn’t currently in print.) Anybody who owns the shorter version-as did I until not long ago-and the two novels separately basically has the full text of the hardback edition less the introductions to the two novels.Īs for the eight short stories themselves, they vary in quality, running from “ First Law" and “ Let’s Get Together", which are fairly uninteresting but not offensively so, up to “ Galley Slave", which was Asimov’s favorite Susan Calvin story at least through the 1960’s, and my favorite as well. More generally available is the paperback edition, Eight Stories From the Rest of the Robots, which consists of just the shorter works. It consists of eight short stories and the full text of The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. The full form of the book is available only in hardback and is long out of print.
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