Robot Dreams (Remembering Tomorrow)

From a good time and the style is fully engaging.I could feel the promise of the time that this was written. QWERTY fun

I expected this to be a collection of robot stories because of the title, but only two are robot stories. They are the first two, and the first one is also a story from _I, Robot_ (which I just re-read). The second one is "Robot Dreams" from which the book takes its title, and it is another Susan Calvin robot story like those from _I, Robot_ but was written in the mid-'80s (_I, Robot_ was written 30 years earlier). It is in the same mold with the earlier stories, but with a nod to advancing technology (small computers, for instance).Many other stories in this collection center on "Multivac," an immense computer. The name is an obvious derivative of UNIVAC, a large, vacuum-tube based computer of the early 1950s. UNIVAC became famous for predicting that Eisenhower would win the 1952 election based on early returns (against pundit predictions that Stevenson would win). That led directly to one story, "Franchise," which takes the ability to sample a small number of votes to predict a total election outcome and drives the idea to an absurd (but nevertheless interesting) extreme.There are a variety of other stories, from ones dealing with beings without bodies to one talking about an alien medical investigator who has come to Earth to find out more about a disease. All are worth the read, and some are truly fascinating and end in very unexpected ways.Ralph McQuarrie provides the cover illustration and several others for individual stories; they are of the style familiar to anyone who has seen original art from "Star Wars" (which he worked on). Asimov's introduction is amusing; he explains what he got right in predicting the future--and what he got spectacularly wrong. He discusses this with respect to both stories in the book (Multivac, for instance) and to other books and stories he had written decades earlier.All in all, this book was a fun read.

I purchased this book because it contains a short story called “The Last Question” that I could not find available in any other Isaac Asimov collection in an e-book format.I won’t review the stories, there is plenty of information out there on Asimov and his writing, this review will only be for the Kindle copy.Unfortunately, the publisher put close to no effort in providing their readers with a properly formatted title. The table of contents has at least one glaring error where one of the stories is a subheading of the one before it. Then there are OCR errors, spacing errors, paragraph break errors throughout the book.The errors break up the flow of the story as you run into sentences that do not make sense and you have to pause and think to realize you’re running into an OCR error.Overall, the stories can still be enjoyed but it’s highly disappointing to see that the publisher puts so little effort in providing a quality product to their paying customers.I wish Amazon would use it’s muscle in situations like this to force quality checks. The publisher can correct the issue or Amazon can hire an editor to do it for them and simply take all proceeds from the sales of the books till Amazon recuperates their editing expenses.

The book is one of the classics of sci-fi. No need to review it. It’s great. This kindle edition… eh, not so much. Formatted wrong, with several typos. It is clearly scanned from some printed one, without correcting the formatting and without reviewing the text for ocr errors… disappointing. Buy a printed edition if you can.

A collection of intriguing short stories from a master. Quick reads, and I was sorry to finish the final tale. If you love Asimov, this should definitely be in your library.

After finishing the last story of the book, I lay trying to get to sleep thinking about how I could best write a review of this book. So I got up an here it is. Isaac Asimov is clearly writing dreams to his robots, the readers, about the birthing pangs of artificial intelligence and trying to control it, to the co-habitation of Man and A.I. Each story starts with you guessing, "What is this going to be about," to wondering at the end with tears or a gasp of "How can he do that?" So if you get this book thinking it's going to be about robots dreaming, you will be sadly let down. This book is about Isaac Azimov giving you his dreams about Artificial Intelligence and the rest is up to you.

A buddy recommended an Asimov short story so I bought this with the intention of focusing on that one. It's my 1st Asimov reading.I loved it. It's imaginative. But best of all, I have a new fave short story. Not the 1 recommended. And not widely known! It's called The Billiard Ball. And I read the last few pages grinning ear-to-ear.As in all collections of stories, I found some better than others. But I never found 1 that I didn't like outright. (how often can that be said?) And ALL the stories are thought provoking (how often...?)It's robot stories (only a few) made me think "How could they've made 'I Robot' better?"The disclaimer/introduction is interesting too. Written in the 80s as an old man, it's not so much of his mea culpa of things he got wrong, but the timeline of his writing that impresses. 1st story he wrote was in 1939 when he was 19! Think of the (lack of) technology back then and these stories jump off the page!

How can one as lowly as me add anything to the Asimov literary criticism? He writes science fiction about space and robots, but his writing is beautifully human. Asimov could have written successfully in any genre he had chosen. If you love science fiction you'll love the stories. If you love literature you will love Asimov's writing. I am fifty years old and my only regret is that I waited this long to begin reading him.

An excellent book by an author whose Robot stories were early - and groundbreaking - classics has been rendered almost unreadable by lack of intelligent proof-reading. I very much suspect that most proof-reading these days is done electronically, and the man who said that a computer is an idiot studying to become a moron pretty much got it in one.I did try marking the typos - mostly errors in formatting such as failure to start a new paragraph when the speaker changed, or intoducing a double line-break in the middle of a sentence - but after the first few chapters I was losing the will to live and gave up the unequal struggle.I was disturbed by the many unfavourable reviews highliting this problem, but most of them were a few years old so I assumed that the books had been proof-read - maybe (miracles have been known to happen) by a Real Human Being - and the problem had been solved. Maybe they haven't been proof-read, or maybe - an even more disturbing possibility - they have and, although I shudder at the thought, they might originally have been even worse.Just as an aside; this ebook costs £6.37, at about the same time I bought two collections of Edgar Wallace classics for 99p each. Now which do you think has the most errors? That's right - Robot Dreams wins by the length of a motorway.

Echoing a couple of other reviews - a classic of science fiction ruined by the most abysmal conversion. Disgraceful.If you can get beyond the poor formatting, the stories within contain some of Asimov's gems, but I would strongly recommend that one purchases the physical version until such time as the formatting of the eBook has been sorted.

I bought this volume to refresh my memories of Asimov's Robot short stories, but was disappointed to find that few of those included featured robots. They are nevertheless well crafted tales, whose main interest now is how prophetic, or otherwise, the "science" has proved to be. This is something that Asimov's own forward waxes eleoquently about. Otherwise the Kindle version has its now expected burden of misspelled and badly parsed errors. Despite Amazon's claims to the contrary, these books are being transcribed to digital format rather badly.With these reservations, if you are interested in vintage SCi-Fi, this is worth having in your collection.

This book is absolutely full of incorrectly formatted sentences and mis-scanned words. Possibly the worst conversion to an e-book I've ever seen. Absolutely no proofing or quality control has gone into it, it's been scanned and dumped into the market for a quick buck. I'd like to see the publisher have the guts to actually issue a revised version with the hundreds, yes hundreds, of format and scan errors corrected.Having said this, some of Asimov's classics are within, - if you can get past the nightmare of an e-book gone wrong. .

Thoughtful stories though clearly of their time and developing at a rather slower pace than we are perhaps used to today. Nevertheless, Asimov has a brilliant instinct for story structure and development and was amongst the most far-sighted writers ever to have put pen to paper. These stories speak to the legendary anxieties of mid-twentieth century populous. Dive in and enjoy. I did!