Asimov Estate Authorizes New I, Robot Books 426
Posted
by
timothy
from the automatic-writing dept.
from the automatic-writing dept.
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."
How about we pay the author not to write them? (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably too late for that. Sigh :(
Cry, Robot... (Score:5, Insightful)
So what... (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Elitism (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, whatever (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:hope for the best (Score:3, Insightful)
-k
Re:Elitism (Score:4, Insightful)
The delicious irony is the wailing about "author's intent" and bemoaning someone other than the original author covering the same ground coming from a group that would gladly see copyright curtailed so that EVERYONE would be free to butcher an author's vision after a period of time.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Oh, whatever (Score:3, Insightful)
I think "The Complete Robot" which includes all the stories from I, Robot and others along with commentary is a great example of this.
Re:How about we pay the author not to write them? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not really their fault. Here's how Hollywood works: when the film rights to a story are bought, the filmmakers almost always have the right to do whatever they want with it. This means they can totally rewrite the story, or even slap the title alone on a different, barely-related story. This is why Graham Greene (IIRC) once said that the best deal authors could get from Hollywood was when the film rights were bought but no movie was ever made. (This frequently happens: the rights to Stranger in a Strange Land, the Foundation Trilogy, and many other works have been bouncing around in Hollywood for many years.)
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:How about we pay the author not to write them? (Score:4, Insightful)
You could not buy it. Then they'd spend money producing a book that nobody wants. And then they wouldn't make any more. It's called a "free market," you should look it up.
Re:How about we pay the author not to write them? (Score:5, Insightful)
FWIW i choose to use my intelligence when considering an adaptive work of any sort, be it a movie based on a book or a book based on a book.
its like this: if i'm from Brooklyn and go to Pizza Hut i'd be a FOOL for expecting the pizza to taste the way it does at home, if i'm from Texas and go into Taco Bell expecting tex-mex i should be shot for stupidity, so why then would any reasonable person go see a movie adapted from a book and expect it to be faithful to their own imagination or even the original authors storyline? Taco Bell isnt bad food, as long as you take it for what it is neither is Pizza Hut. Personally i enjoyed both the Asimov stories as well as the iRobot movie, but i just know what to expect from each.
also, i dont see anyone roasting Timothy Zahn for his star wars novels. personally i think many of those are better than Return of the Jedi, and definitly better than Lucases last three 'epics' if thats anything to go on, i'm glad Asimov never wrote another robot book, it could haev been worse than Danielle Steele
Re:Sigh (Score:2, Insightful)
My AI course teacher said that AI was whatever we hadn't figured out to do with computers yet.
Revisionist Colored Glasses (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Cry, Robot... (Score:3, Insightful)
He wasn't all that good a writer. When I was younger, I thought he was awesome. But, as I got older, I saw Asimov's plots to be more and more predictable, and his characters one-dimensional. There are plenty of writers today who would bury Asimov if he weren't already dead.
I think it's a Good Thing(TM) that the movie didn't slavishly imitate the stories. Go back and read them - unlike, say, Stranger in a Strange Land, they aged badly, and the last few stories were ... boring. If the horse wasn't already dead, it was taking a good flogging.
Re:How about we pay the author not to write them? (Score:5, Insightful)
The sad thing is that when you look on a bookstore's shelf, there's hardly anything left of 'hard' science fiction.
Apparently, to sell a book in the 'sci fi genre', it needs to have a touch of orc death, or perhaps an alternate universe where there's a some sort of hierarchical plot involving robes, old truths, and perhaps incantations.
I long for Azimov, Heinlein, Dickson, Ellison, Sheckley, etc. Even Pournelle and Niven have seemingly hung up their stirrups.
Movies from these guys' works? Unlikely to work. The CGI of the mind is not the CGI of the screen.
Re:Sigh (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Then don't read them (Score:1, Insightful)
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!
Re:Sigh (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Asimov didn't abandon the Robot idea 40 years ago (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
You should be free to cover the same ground. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:How about we pay the author not to write them? (Score:3, Insightful)
As I remember The Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire came out about 25-30 years after the original short stories, so it's pretty clear Asimov would have written more stories or novels about the robots if he had a story to tell. Asimov was a commercial writer in the age of pulp magazines. That, by definition, is a sell-out.
That he managed to produce such a body of acclaimed work is a function of his work ethic and talent, not his "artistic sensibility" or the "purity" of his body of work.
I disagree (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
If you disagree, just don't bother reading it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:hope for the best (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:How about we pay the author not to write them? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree. It isn't sad that a person writes a follow up. It is sad that only one person is allowed to do so.
We are not allowed to stand on the shoulders of giants anymore.