Calvinist Confession

I relented and read the latest Robot book authorized by the Asimov estate - although its presence on the Mechanics Institute Library new acquistions shelf might have been a factor. I, Robot: to protect is the first in a trilogy featuring Susan Calvin. This volume's author is Mickey Zucker Reichert (I do not know if the plan is similar to the Foundation series additions, in which each volume had a separate author). Prequels in particular activate my skepticism gland, since predetermination can sap the suspense from a story, or even worse, make additions that violate the ethos of the pre-existing corpus (I'm looking at you, midi-chlorians!).

In this case, however, the plot and background feel like a much-needed updating of Asimovian history of robotics - he admitted and rued many of the errors in conception that he made before the invention of the computer field. The reset of the timeline does not bother me - there is a little-known timeline in Let's Buy Jupiter and Other Stories, an admittedly pale imitation of Heinlein's Future History, which featured a Solar System-centricity and the presence of numerous alien species, and is thus fundamentally incompatible with the Robot-Empire-Foundation universe established later. Compared to that contrast, the change of chronology in I, Robot: to protect is a soft reset, even if it demolishes my favorite conceit that Susan Calvin (b. 1984) is in my same age set and intellectual impi. The temporal reset unfortunately will not discourage some fans from trying to shoehorn the new timeline into the Robot-Empire-Foundation series. I, on the other hand, regard it as a new timeline.

I do not reach these conclusion on Calvin's birthdate alone. The modus operandi of to protect seems to be incorporate and tighten the various strands of the original stories as much as possible, as reboots of a franchise often do. Susan lives with her father, John Calvin (an Asimovian joke indeed), a roboticist at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, who bears a resemblance in his eating habits to Stephen Byerley. Susan already possesses the waspish tongue that was one of her first character traits. She is, of course, plain, but no so much that all men overlook her. The Society for Humanity is present and performing its dramatic function as an all-purpose extreme protest group. The original profession of Susan is psychologist, which is a logical ex post facto  extrapolation, but the hospital in which she works contains several threads from the short stories. The nanobots (did Asimov coin that term too?) are deployed differently than poor Mike the nanobot, and Nate the hospital robot seems to fulfill the role of romantic rival and enabler of Susan's (as yet) mild robophilia, more Herbie than Lenny. Even Susan's interest in the oppositie sex has precedent in the short stories, although there it remained unrequited.

Most of the action in to protect establishes Susan's intelligence and personality, and creates a mystery of nanorobot and human interaction for following volumes. Reichardt, thankfully, writes dialogues that is a little less flat than Asimov - in short stories, Asimov's prose works well, but it becomes tedious in longer works (such as Robots and Empire). In short, it accomplishes the fundamental tasks of the intial volume of a trilogy: establish the main character, the main conflict or mystery, and entice the reader to return.