The first chapter, "The Coming of the Robots", included some of Asimov's earliest robot stories, where the Three Laws of Robotics were not yet explicitly defined. The texts in the collection were grouped into four chapters, differentiating their central themes.
None of the short stories in this collection were in I, Robot, however all of them were later included in The Complete Robot, and both novels about Elijah Baley were also published separately. Another collection of short stories about robots, I, Robot, was re-published in the previous year, which is why Asimov chose to title the collection as The Rest of the Robots. The stories, centred on positronic robots, are all part of the Robot series, most of which take place in the Foundation universe. The owner of The Complete Robot, then, should have no real need to get this volume, except to fill out a collection.The Rest of the Robots is a collection of eight short stories and two full-length novels by American writer Isaac Asimov, published in 1964. In particular, there are none of the short stories here which aren’t in The Complete Robot, and the introductions aren’t all that interesting. This collection is worth having for the sake of “ Galley Slave" alone-but if one already owns a copy of “ Galley Slave", “ Satisfaction Guaranteed", or “ Victory Unintentional", there’s no real need to have the other five stories tag along.
The overall effect is rather middle-of-the-road. “ Lenny" I do not particularly care for “ Robot AL-76 Goes Astray" is mildly amusing (although I enjoyed it much more as a teenager than I do now), and “ Risk" is actually fairly forgettable for some reason. (I'm a sucker for courtroom dramas, and this one is very well done.) I'm also very fond of “ Victory Unintentional" and “ Satisfaction Guaranteed"-the former is one of Asimov’s best attempts at humor, and the latter has a delightful twist to it. (The paperback edition goes in and out of print and was available fairly recently, even if it isn’t currently in print.) Anybody who owns the shorter version-as did I until not long ago-and the two novels separately basically has the full text of the hardback edition less the introductions to the two novels.Īs for the eight short stories themselves, they vary in quality, running from “ First Law" and “ Let’s Get Together", which are fairly uninteresting but not offensively so, up to “ Galley Slave", which was Asimov’s favorite Susan Calvin story at least through the 1960’s, and my favorite as well. More generally available is the paperback edition, Eight Stories From the Rest of the Robots, which consists of just the shorter works. It consists of eight short stories and the full text of The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. The full form of the book is available only in hardback and is long out of print.
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