I’m currently re-visiting an old favorite, untouched on my shelf since I received it as a Christmas gift the year it was published, 1983. The Robots of Dawn is a sequel to The Caves of Steel, which I’ve reviewed previously, and The Naked Sun. These are the first three of Isaac Asimov’s “robot novels,” which eventually became precursors to his more famous Foundation series. This particular novel was written some 25 years after the books it sequelizes. Times had become more liberal, allowing Asimov to openly discuss topics in human-robot interactions that he hadn’t been able to visit within the confines of 1950s SF. Specifically, The Robots of Dawn prominently features the complications which result when a human woman marries a robot. Lots of author before had probably speculated on robot sex, and many have since; but this was speculation on robot sex by the master of the robot story. Continue reading →