Robot City, Isaac Asimov's, Book One: Odyssey
M.P. Kube-McDowell
I bought this book thinking that it was written by renown science fiction author Isaac Asimov. After it lived on my bookshelf for a year, I picked it and paid more attention to it than when I bought it, and was momentarily disappointed. With a more detailed look at the cover, I noticed that it just says Isaac Asimov above the title, with an apostrophe-S appended to the name, and another writer's name in fine print near the bottom... Uh-oh, I thought, I think I've seen this type of thing before... However, I decided to give it a chance, ready to back out at the slightest hint of boringness. So I read the intro by Isaac Asimov, where he was kind to the actual author (as you would expect / hope), and also to an illustrator- one Paul Rivoche, whom, as it turns out, I knew in high school. My interest immediately rekindled, I dove in. (The illustrations are great, by the way--- I bought the book because of Asimov's name, the cool sounding title, and the way cool cover art--- I am often suckered in by cool images like this.)
The book seems to be written with Asimov's famous (to geeks, anyway) three laws of robotics as a major and ever-present theme element, which worried me, initially. That aside, it is actually a pretty good read- it includes a protagonist marooned astronaut, robots, space raiders, good aliens, bad aliens (including a really bad antagonist alien), a mysterious female, space ships, cool technology, more robots, and of course, a great big robot city. Fairly light reading, but I want to read the second book now!
