Book Review of “God, Robot”

god, robotI promised Anthony Marchetta that I’d write a review on Amazon when I finished reading his book God, Robot. It went online yesterday. You can find it here.

However, for your convenience, I’ve reproduced my review below. Enjoy.

I feel a little like I’m proverbially biting the hand that has fed me. I heard about “God, Robot” several weeks ago from a friend of mine and was intrigued by the concept. After a bit of “Googling,” I found Anthony Marchetta’s blog. Before reading and reviewing his book, I wanted to take a crack at writing my own story based rather loosely on his concept of robots being programmed with the “two greatest commandments” rather than Asimov’s three laws.

With Mr. Marchetta’s permission, I have used his base concept to write and publish two short stories on my own blog and I’m currently working on a third. Now that I’ve finished his book, I’m here to write my review.

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The Maker Dilemma

robot law

Image: TeeFury.com

I promised a sequel to The Robot Who Loved God and here it is. Hopefully, it will address a lot of the reader’s analysis found here. I think I’ve added some interesting twists and surprises that you might not have anticipated from the way the previous story ends.

I’ve edited this story to the best of my ability (and patience to keep reading and re-reading it). No doubt there are still typos and other problems. Please let me know when you find them and I’ll do my best to fix everything.

I’ll post more about this short story after the conclusion.

Act One: The Failed Maker

“What do you mean you can’t make another one?” Richard Underwood didn’t shout. He spoke in a breathy whisper, shock and outrage strangling his throat.

Professor Noah Abramson, Ph.Ds. in Physics and Molecular Computing, Vice President of Research and Development at the National Robotics Corporation (NRC), and the creator of the world’s first fully functional Positronic brain had been dreading this moment all morning.

Eight months ago, for one shining and tragic week, Abramson and his Positronics Lab team had activated George, the Positronic Asimovian Robot (PAR) fifth edition prototype and put the experimental robot through his paces. Then they deactivated him, but not before George offered up a revolutionary revelation to the Professor and his team, that an artificially intelligent and self-aware humanoid robot had come to faith in the God of Israel, Noah Abramson’s God.

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A Reader’s Analysis of “The Robot Who Loved God”

One of my regular readers on my Morning Meditations blog took the time to read The Robot Who Loved God and render a detailed analysis. He emailed me a 35-page Word doc not only correcting my typos (I’m amazed I missed so many after making multiple passes through the story – all typos have been corrected here but not in my original story at A Million Chimpanzees), but offering numerous editorial comments.

I’m including those comments here as well as my responses. I hope you’ll find them as illuminating as I did.

Quotes from the referenced story will be indicated as such in bold text and the content itself in italics. Editorial notes will be in red-colored text. My responses will be in regular text.

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The Robot Who Loved God

This short story originally appeared on the A Million Chimpanzees blog, the first BlogSpot I created. I’ve since launched Powered by Robots as an exclusive venue for my short story writing. To find out more, please visit my page. Enjoy.

The initial event that resulted in my most ambitious fiction writing project to date happened a few Sundays ago over coffee with my friend Tom. He mentioned a book he wanted to read, an anthology edited by Anthony Marchetta called God, Robot. This is a collection of stories based on the premise of Isaac Asimov-like Positronic robots that have been programmed with two Bible verses rather than Asimov’s famous Three Laws. These verses are recorded in the New Testament in Matthew 22:35-40 and Mark 12:28-34 and are based on Deuteronomy 6:4-5 and Leviticus 19:18.

I’m a long-time fan of Asimov’s robots stories and have always been fascinated by the interplay between the Three Laws and how their potentials shifted due to certain situations, rather than remaining hard absolutes. This allowed Positronic robots to be unpredictable and thus interesting, challenging the human beings who sometimes found themselves not in control of their creations.

I started to imagine what it would be like to write such a story. I went online, found Marchetta’s blog, and contacted him, asking permission to write such a story on my “Million Chimpanzees” blogspot. To my delight, not only did he consent, but he said he was flattered at the request.

What follows is the result of my labors. I’ve probably spent more time writing and editing this short story (about twenty pages long when copied into Word) than any of my previous efforts. I’m sure it still needs much improvement, but I’ll leave it up to whoever reads it to let me know what I could do better.

At the end of the story, I’ll relate more about my influences and a few other insights.

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