Mark Golden

Definitely worth reading, but avoid the audio version

Revisado: 06-26-22

If you keep current in business and association management and pay attention to the literature, much of this content will be familiar to you. But Amith Nagarajan’s traversal of the material provides a holistic view that makes it all fit together in ways you may not have noticed before. If it prompts you to step back and take a similar view of your own professional situation, that might accomplish a lot.

I would avoid the Audible version, however. The over emphatic, stilted and monotonously delivered narration reminded me of a sixth grader tasked with reading material they don’t really understand aloud to the class. Just painful, and a disservice to the valuable contents of the book.

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Misses the mark if taken as straight mystery story - with just enough of a hint of the Universe to come to make it indispensable

Revisado: 08-06-18

I should state up front that I came to the Asimov robot novels only AFTER consuming the Foundation series (original trilogy, prequels and sequels.) So my passion was to learn more about the history of robots and the struggles in human galactic civilizations chronicled there.

The ideas are all there and Asimov is too deep and consistent a thinker to allow discontinuities in the later novels that tied his so-called robot universe to the Foundation universe. So the foundation (pun intended) of so much that is to follow is well laid out here. But when written, he intended this as a stand-alone, futuristic detective novel, and on that basis it is a little weak. Too many red herrings too swiftly set up and knocked down, and I am not sure he played entirely fair with the reader. Too much information critical to solving the mystery withheld from the reader until the solution itself is revealed.

But it does introduce the most fascinating and enduring (literally and figuratively) character in the Asimov universe(s): R. Daneel Olivaw and the human protagonist Elijah Bailey. Of the two, Daneel has the more auspicious introduction. Bailey is a little too close to caricature of the noir detective transplanted to a sci-fi setting.

So it doesn’t quite cut it, considered as a mystery yarn. And it hasn’t quite reached the quality of universe-defining Asimov would later achieve. Or even match the provocatively intellectual richness of the (mostly earlier) robot short stories. He has not yet attained the ability to test and sustain the dilemmas of the Three Laws at novel lengths.

But even less than top shelf Asimov is better than 99% of the rest of the genre, and it was an auspicious start to themes, ideas and even characters he would develop more fully in the works yet to come.

Narrator William Dufris does a fine job, but I personally prefer the more straight delivery and gravitas of Scott Brick in the Foundation prequels to Dufris’ approach, creating different character voices for each person. Too often, already rather two-dimensional characters (particularly minor players) are further diminished by the arbitrary assignment of a stock cartoon character voice. His voicing of female characters is particularly grating ... a defect that will only become more glaring with the introduction of a key, female character in the robot novels that follow.

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