Subject: Review: Caliban, by Roger MacBride-Allen

From: Warren Dunn <[email-masked]>
Date: 17 Dec 1999 15:49:09 -0500

Caliban, by Roger MacBride-Allen
	Review Copyright 1999 by Warren Dunn

A leading robot designer is nearly killed, and all evidence points to a
robot as perpetrator.  But robots cannot harm humans, so the search goes
elsewhere.  But Caliban is a lawless robot, and finds himself hiding from
the police, and just about everyone else.

SPOILERS BELOW.

Caliban brought me back to the time when I had read Asimov's robot novels.
I haven't picked those up in a long time.  Now I want to read them again.

  But MacBride-Allen is not Asimov, and Caliban does not come off as
smoothly as any of the Lije Bailey novels did.  The robot stories have
almost always revolved around murder and the flexibility of the Three Laws
of Robotics.

  First Law: A robot may not harm a human, or through inaction, allow a
  human to come to harm.  Second Law: A robot must obey a human, except
  where this conflicts with the second law.  Third Law: A robot must not
  let itself come to harm, except where this conflicts with the first or
  second laws.

  Maybe attempted murder is not a good enough plot to hand a mystery on.
Or maybe Allen is just not a skilled as Asimov!

  The story starts out well enough.  It brought me back to Spacer society
as I've always remembered it: high and mighty, but stagnant.  The planet
Inferno is dying.  They have brought in Settlers (people from Earth who
have settled among the stars, and who have banned robots) to help them
stabilize their ecology.

  Leving Labs has created a new type of robot, but this is not revealed
until about halfway through the book, which provides a bunch of misleading
pieces of evidence, which I found pleasant at first, but annoying as more
and more of them came into focus.  This robot has a different set of laws,
which makes them more free, and less slave.

  But Caliban has no laws.  He was designed to discover his own set of
laws.  But he was never meant to leave the lab.  But it appears that he
attacked Fredda Leving, his creator, and ran out.

  He spends the next two days running from the police, and demonstrating
that he doesn't know the three laws, something the police are slow to
catch on to.  But through his actions, and the report of a supervisor
robot, they discover that they must track him down, and thus keep humans
safe.

  Meanwhile, Leving labs, and the settler leader plant many false clues,
and hinder the justice procedure just enough to confuse sheriff Kresh, and
his assistant, the robot Donald.  Because Kresh had always lived on
Inferno, he doesn't have the viewpoint that Bailey had, and is thus not as
good a detective.  His assistant is no R. Daneel, either, but is very fun
to read about.

  There is not much of a plot other than chasing errant clues.  There are
some very slow moments, when Leving is making her two lectures.  They
really brought the book to a halt.  I'm sure it could have been done
another way.

  The animosity between the settlers and the spacers was presented fairly
well.  But I don't think those scenes worked as well as they should have.

  I may be wrong, but I believe Asimov made his robot novels almost
entirely from the point of view of Bailey and Daneel.  I think that might
have worked better than changing viewpoints every couple of pages.

  The ending was very well done, though.  I had determined the perpetrator
about a hundred pages before the Sheriff did, as soon as the double-blind
study was made.  I just couldn't determine a motive, or how it was done.
But it did make sense once revealed.  If Kresh hadn't been so sleepy, or
so trusting, in both robots and his witnesses, he would have figured it
out when I did, as well.

  I have to wonder about the test Donald and Kresh devised at the end,
though.  The fact that the robots didn't move could have easily proved
they were New Law robots, not No Law robots.  But I guess the fact that
the robot was late in imitating the old First Law proved that it was
hiding something else.  I'm not sure, but it doesn't detract from a very
decent ending.

%A Roger MacBride-Allen
%T Caliban
%S Isaac Asimov's Robots
%V Book 1
%I ACE Science Fiction
%D 1993
%G ISBN 0-441-09079-6
%P 312 pp.
%O Hardcover, US$15.99