The Positronic Man - Hardcover

Isaac Asimov; Robert Silverberg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385263422 ISBN 13: 9780385263429

Publisher: Doubleday, 1993

Synopsis

Andrew Martin, a standard housekeeping robot, allows the unique capabilities of his experimental brain to lead him to become an artist, businessman, and crusader, in a novel based on Asimov's short story, "The Bicentennial Man." 35,000 first printing. $35,000 ad/promo.

About this title

Reviews

The third and final collaborative novel from Silverberg and the late Asimov ( Nightfall ; The Ugly Little Boy ) follows Asimov's classic story, "The Bicentennial Man," step by step (whole sentences and paragraphs remain), adding extra scenes for length. The novel chronicles the quest of the robot Andrew Martin (dubbed NDR-113 at the factory) to achieve the rights, privileges, appearance and ultimately even the weaknesses of being fully human. When brought to the home of wealthy politician Gerald Martin, Andrew is little more than a standard household robot, but he quickly develops a remarkable, even artistic, skill in woodworking. He proceeds to stretch his increasingly human-like mind, seeking and winning his freedom and legal rights, grieving as human friends die and he lives on, replacing his robotic parts with organic prostheses of his own design. But he cannot replace his positronic brain, so he must finally appeal to the World Court to be declared human in all respects. Focused on the question of what it means to be human, Asimov's short story is a masterpiece in which the thinness of the background doesn't matter. The absence of a convincing future world or well-developed characters is glaring here. Readers interested in contemplating the human potential of robots would do better to reread the original.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Third and final collaboration between the late Asimov and Silverberg (Nightfall, 1990; The Ugly Little Boy, 1992), this based on Asimov's famous long story ``The Bicentennial Man.'' Here, we get the biography of Andrew Martin--an apparently ordinary humaniform housekeeping robot whose experimental brain leads him to demonstrate capabilities hitherto considered unrobotic: he first becomes an artist, then a businessman; finally, he embarks upon a consciousness-raising campaign to have himself declared human in all respects. Like its predecessors, this novel-length rewrite doesn't significantly improve upon the original, but merely expands upon it. Still, there's bound to be an audience for Asimov's last novel, even if he didn't actually write it. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

A housekeeping robot transcends the laws that limit him in his desire to become human in this final collaboration between two sf masters. Based on The Bicentennial Man by the late Asimov, this expanded novel will appeal to fans of old-school sf. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/93.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385263422
• ISBN 13: 9780385263429
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 204