This book is a shame: they did a robot ...
924423
This  book  is  a  shame  :  they  did  a  robot  translation  into  Spanish  language .  The  result  is  an  insult  to  Spanish  readers  since  every  frase  is  erronous  ! .
The  only  positive  item  in  this  book  are  the  photografies.
4934565
I bought this book with the humble desire of creating a simple companion. After I finished, the Creation turned on me and my family and reprogrammed my VCR. It then proceeded to change the message on my answering machine. It somehow convinced my Nissan truck not to allow me inside. I fear for my life. How could I have let it go this far? All I really wanted was a cute little Furby but I ended up with a cyber-monster with dreams of wiping out humans and creating a robotic Utopian Hell.....other than that, the book was pretty cool.
3241122
After reading the synopsis of this book, I was truly excited for what sounded like a story about the pain and loss of almost the entire human race, and how interesting the culture could be after 5000 years for what was left of the survivors.

And let down, slowly, page by page, as though I was also trapped on the ISS and there was a slow oxygen leak. If you read pretty much any of the other 1 and 2 star reviews, you'll see that I'm just echoing many thoughts and feelings about this novel. 2/3rds tech manual, 1/3 really weird attempt at creating an interesting culture.

Spoilers ahead, but who cares? You probably saw them coming from 220 miles away.

As other people have said, Stephenson somehow managed to take what should have been an extremely emotional and terrifying situation, suck all of the humanity and life out of it, and continue writing uninteresting technical babble as though that was the reason most people picked up the book. It really does feel like the human element is just added because he knew he couldn't sell "How To Synchronize Orbits" to this large of an audience. And hey, I love technical details. I love it when an author can write in such a way that I feel like he/she may actually have been in outer space. But this felt like the author was a robot who had been in outer space and had no idea how humans might respond in the face of watching their species disappear.

The bigger letdown for me was actually the last third of the book, where you jump ahead 5000 years to see what happened to the survivors. And what happens? Nothing interesting. Would seven "genetically distinct" races have remained so separated in that amount of time? I don't know. Would these people go on, 5000 years in the future, still worshiping (and *constantly* watching!) all of the digital footage they maintained from when humans first started fleeing to the ISS (and what happened afterward)? Maybe, but it feels much more like Stephenson had no idea how to create an alien culture, and so he froze the culture he knew and played it off like it wouldn't have changed at all in that time.  Even the other two 'races' he introduces (the twist you'd have to have skimmed most of the novel to miss, and, well, I wouldn't blame you if you did skim most of it) are just... the same. One of them even still speaks "perfect pre-Zero English", as though the language would not evolve AT ALL after 5000 years.

I don't know well enough to say that these things aren't plausible. I do know that I'm not interested in reading a future in which nothing changed, and the author can't figure out how to describe sex without making it sound robotic and awkward, and one of the characters mentions "having heard about Watergate".  Anything interesting he managed to conjure up in this novel was quickly buried by tens more pages of boring details and surprisingly poor writing. The really unfortunate thing here is that this was the first book of his I read, and no matter what other people tell me about how good his other novels are... I just can't muster up the desire to read any of it.
1613921
After 3 weeks of use - I feel that if this is what we will introduce our kids as 'science' - we are taking them down the path of pop science - stupid science enclosed in a way to think that our kids will learn something awesome from this ...

The 'robot' does nothing else other than moving ... why call this a robot ?

disappointing - except that it is a 1 hour project which you will probably never touch again
1152133
an extraordinary time in an ordinary place.  Like the greatest science fiction writers before him, M.J. McShea takes us to an imaginary future to illuminate the unsettling realities we face today.
The robot in the title is neither mechanical nor electronic.  Don't think C-3PO; think Karel Capek's R.U.R.--or Blade Runner, for that matter.  Think living tissue--living people--commercially manufactured, with profit as the only guiding principle.  That's what McShea wants you to think about--NOW--before this frighteningly plausible technology overruns us, leaving no time to consider the moral and legal position of the new and vulnerable minority it will create.
Yet for all the urgency of Just a Robot's message, there's nothing frantic--or even pedantic--about McShea's writing style. On the contrary, his prose flows with nearly conversational ease.  It's as if you'd met the author in a tavern, and he'd bought you a drink, and then casually tipped back his chair and asked, "Did I ever tell you about the time this corrupt but desperately inept manufacturer of living people tried to pass off a killer android as a housekeeping robot?  No?  Well,''-smiling broadly-"let me tell you a story. . . . . "
In fact, McShea's casual style is his greatest ally, allowing him to slip seamlessly from adventure storyteller to musing philosopher to cautionary prophet without ever lapsing into righteous preaching.
Only don't get TOO relaxed.  Private industry is already manufacturing genetically tailored tomatoes, and experimenting with genetically altered insects.  The commercial manufacture of people will bear down on us soon enough, and we're going to have a LOT of moral, ethical, and even theological questions to answer--without much time to answer them.
And we won't be able to say that M.J. McShea didn't warn us.
2225843
I really enjoy sci-fi the likes of I Robot from Isaac Asimov and many many Joe Haldeman stories, but this particular collection is terrible. I'm about 8 stories in and there's not even one gem so far. I believe this book should be re-titled to - " The Ultra-Contemplative Super-Pseudo-Intellectual's Guide to Boring Science Fiction Stories. Sorry, it's just not a very good book.
292651
For the true Asimov fan I suppose the movie "I, Robot" was a huge disapointment however my husband and I really enjoyed the movie and (having never read the I, Robot series) we expected the books to be even better.  Well, my husband listened to the audio CD and he was really dissapointed.  There are very few similarities.  So, if you're a fan of the movie don't expect to enjoy the book all that much.
3470593
Alix Paultre's novel, "Cyberchild," claims to be the story of a child who is accidentally infected with an experimental strain of nano-robots that essentially build a computer in her brain.

And that does happen in the book.

But that's not what the book is about. The book is really about the power politics surrounding the development of the nano-robots. It unhappily (at least for me) devolves into a somewhat dreary near-future shoot-em-up where the plot possibilities of the tech are eclipsed by a not-particularly-well-done military finale.

The first third of the book is tantalizing with the possibilities of the tech. However, the author takes too long to establish the characters, and once you figure out that the girl--the cyberchild of the title--is really nothing more than a little girl with a wireless connection to the Internet in her head living in a part of the world where knowledge is still considered miraculous, you have to keep reading through your disappointment.

There are astonishing visions of tech in this novel: the author mentions in passing that if one upgrades the artificial intelligence (the AI) in their car beyond a certain point, they will have to register the machine as a sentient consciousness. The author also drops the ball with the little girl and the nanobots that build a computer in her head.

Ultimately, I think this novel stands as a sign of failed imagination. The tech and its possibilities set up in its pages could be nothing short of jaw dropping.

How sad that it ended up being nothing but banal.
4857316
Robots designed to be provide different services for humanity. Things go wonky  when eventually some of the A.I. develop in an unanticipated way.
A different take on an old caution about what could happen if mankind allows unbridled development of advanced technology.
The story slowly reveals itself over much of the book.  Made me wonder if Asimov would be spinning in his grave.
His 3 (oh yeah, the series ended up adding a 4th) laws could have saved a lot of misery for the some of the characters.
Will man EVER grow up?!?
1595034
The promise of brain science is a lie. Cron probably has, all told, about a page and a half worth of mentions of brain science. In no way does she come up with anything more advanced than the claim that "we evolved to tell stories" . I really liked her other book, Wired for Story, so this was disappointing.

Let me save you some trouble. The parts worth reading are between pages 35 and 140 (approximately). Cron has some useful general theories on what makes stories compelling, but the further along it goes, the worse it gets. The bits about "plot vs. story" and "the third rail" are the highlights. Likewise, the exercises are good. Which is why you'd do well to borrow this book or get it out of a library and just write them down and do them.

The rest is really useless. The entire mess with Scene Cards (which we're capitalizing now because apparently they're a brand or something???) and folders just got obnoxious.

The part that bothered me most was her friend Jennie's first draft. Cron uses that as her example for everything. Except Jennie's story and her writing didn't improve. It got worse. Nothing Cron had Jennie do resulted in a story that made me care or even kept me interested. Her protagonist Ruby just bored me to tears and I didn't buy a bit of her emotional reactions or her backstory, despite there being a hyperfocus on it.

If I had to put the problem in a nutshell? Cron entitled chapter five of the book "The Why: Why, Exactly, Does Your Protagonist Care". She forgot about making THE READER care. Which is the actual point of all this. Cron seems to think that if you set up a world that's engaging to your protagonist, it automatically will be engaging to your readers. As Jennie's novel illustrates, it rally doesn't.
387846
On Basilisk Station is a skillfully constructed story. Weber takes his readers from start to finish creatively and efficiently. Chapter by chapter the story advances and another piece of the puzzle falls into place. Weber's story telling skills makes for good entertainment, consisting of non-stop action and strategy, which is why it's so disappointing to realize how terrible this book actually is.

Beyond the story, there are problems with the characters. They are predominately comprised of tin soldiers that have no personality beyond that which is required to fulfill their duties. Their decisions tend to only consider duty and therefore, the results of their decisions all appear to be decisive and assured, as if there are no other options other than to fulfill their roles in Weber's play. In reality, humans in charge of executing conflicts are cursed with doubt, live with remorse over outcomes, and suffer disgust with circumstances over which they have no control. The characters in this book either shrug off such feelings over a couple paragraphs or never indicate that anything other than duty drives their behavior.

Then there is the setting. It's problematic to classify this book as science fiction. Royalty has survived our journey to other worlds and dueling has somehow been revived as means of settling matters of honor between individuals. Weber also transplants, through centuries of time, earth's present-day political spectrum. It may be that Weber believes that present-day politics have evolved into their ultimate form. Or more likely, this transplantation serves as a self-made means for Weber to voice his commentary on present-day political beliefs, which he does throughout the book. And finally, there is Weber's suggestion that derogatory references to alien beings are acceptable, if those aliens are different in appearance and less technologically advanced than humans.

So is this a science fiction novel? There is an abundance of techno-babble, but there is also these words by Marshall Benton Tymn, a Pilgrim Award* recipient. In this passage, Tymn provides his justification for using science fiction as classroom literature:

"because science fiction portrays a multitude of alternate futures, it can provide students not only with a means for evaluating the forces affecting the shape the future may take, but also with extrapolations depicting various directions in which advances in science and technology may lead us. These alternate futures can also provide the perspectives needed to appreciate the possibilities open to society and the human race - a vision not always easy to achieve in our rapidly changing environment."

This is not one of those books.

* The Pilgrim Award was created in 1970 by the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) to honor distinguished contributions to scholarship in the fields of SF and fantasy.
4619500
This is the worst book I have read in a long time. It seems primarilya conduit for the authors' opinions and theories, masked as a hi-techindustrial espionage mystery.  The characters seem conceived by adolescents. They are consistently unlikeable, uninteresting, and unchanging, serving primarily to voice arguments that Minsky has only slightly more completely addressed in his previous book, The Society of Mind. The inane and boring plot shows a glimmer of promise at the very end for two reasons: One is a betrayal that is unexpected only because it appears in this otherwise flat book. The other is a one-page encounter with the only character who is even mildly interesting.
The pointed descriptions of everyday use of technology now being researched at the MIT Media Lab is distracting. The authors use grammar that is adulterated by the frequent, jarring, annoying omission of the subjects of sentences, both in the narrative as well as human and robot dialogs. This type of writing has the pretense of revolutionary style, while really exposing a complete lack of expressiveness.
If you want to know Minsky's theories about AI as well as his opinions on a wide range of subjects, you will find The Society of Mind far more thought-provoking and interesting than this book. If you want a simply but clearly articulated vision of the future as suggested by the work at MIT's Media Lab, read Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital. If you want entertaining and surprising science fiction about robots, read Isaac Asimov's short stories.  Read them by the light of a fire, and fuel it with The Turing Option.  END
2612389
This book was fast moving and fun to read. Maybe the very best of the 10+ relevant Google books I've read.

Unfortunately for me, an hour after I finished this book, I started reading the newer book called 'How Google Works' (by Google CEO Eric Schmidt).

That book crawls along at a snail's pace compared to 'In the Plex'. For real. It totally lacks the depth of info that 'In the Plex' provides.

(Schmidt's book is mainly about corporate ideals and types of people to hire & how to create environments to keep them happy, etc. I'm not really sure what it's about yet and I'm 75 pages into it).

If you only intend to buy one book about Google, I'd definitely recommend 'In the Plex'.

It tells the history and ends around 2010.

I was hoping the Eric Schmidt book would fill in the gap on newer developments, but so far it hasn't and I doubt it will.

I wish the author of 'In the Plex' could do a follow-up (Part Two) book on Google from 2011-2015.

He's a much better story-teller.
105047
This is one of those rare franchises where I saw the movie before reading the book. The converse usually results in abject disappointment, so this was a nice refreshing change.

Now Im aware that other than sharing the title and some character names, it would appear at first glance that the movie (starring Will Smith) has absolutely nothing more to do with the book, which is a totally erroneous conclusion. Both should be considered as separate works of art, just like Phillip K. Dicks Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and its corresponding movie, Bladerunner. In fact, at the end credits of I, Robot, it acknowledges Asimov by saying that the movie is suggested by rather than based on the book of the same name. Indeed, intrinsic to the movies plot is the Three Fundamental Laws of Robotics, which is arguably the entire framework on which the book is pinned on.

Its as if the great Professor had came up with the Three Laws first, before tinkering with the postulates and assumptions, craftily working a story around the exploration of each possible nuance and loophole. The entire book is written from the perspective of Dr. Susan Calvin, the great robopsychologist of US Robots & Mechanical Men, a corporate behemoth in robot manufacturing and design, who is being interviewed by the narrator (a journalist) at the twilight of her career. She reflects on the evolution of the positronic brains and robotic technology with a series of pivotal accounts that expose a new set of problems with each stage of advancement leading, rather climatically, to an end in which a War with the Machines, the pinnacle of robotic evolution with vast computing powers that run the industrial and economic processes of the world, is implied.

Along the way, the reader encounters stories that expound on the natural inclination of human nature to anthropomorphize robots, a robotic Descartes that grapples with existentialism, a mind-reading robot that pushes the Robotic Laws notion of injury to non-physical realms, the consequences of not impressioning the complete First Law on the Nestor models for economic profit, and finally, in the inevitable conflict, we meet the so-called benevolent Machines in a story that explores free will and faith. Toward the end of the book, Dr. Susan Calvin explains that the First Three Laws are based on the qualities of what makes a good person/man, an Aristotelian ideal, if you will. But the increasing dependence on robots invariably led to benevolent machines running the world which leads to an interesting question for humanity: if given the choice of ending war and conflict at the expense of free will, would we permit benevolent machines to run the world? Or is our destiny and the requirement for the transcendence of our souls to continue making those mistakes at the expense of a life free of violence?

Unlike many other stories of the genre, I, Robot isn't merely a cautionary tale of technological solutionism, robotic evolution or artificial intelligence gone awry. True to classic Asimov style, the prose and dialogue between the characters may come off a little quirky at times, but the subtler points of the stories make you dream and think about humanitys place in the world, our exponentially increasing technological prowess, and the resulting complications that might undermine our well-being and perhaps, our existence.
1687506
Asimov must be rolling in his grave.  Unlike Asimov's creations, this book barely has a plot and drones on forever.  I'm not sure why the author thinks devoting a third of the book to some simulations of Voltaire and Joan of Arc having a discourse would be worth reading, but the whole novel falls flat.  Skip this one, or better yet, run away....
4857747
I love scifi books and that's the reason I bought Anomaly. However, from the very beginning, I realized the book was poor. The idea of first encounter is not new and this is the worst description of it.

First, the thing called the Anomaly arrives with no emotion at all in the first pages of the book. Just a few short sentences and it is there. Second, besides all the Nobel Prizes and thousands of PhDs in all fields living in US the person charged to study the science of the anomaly is an elementary school teacher, with no scientific background at all. With no PhD - not even a Master degree. Someone who says that the only chemical element he knows is "Absurdium".  And he is the guy who is going to advice the US President, NSA and a few true scientists gathered on field on what to do with the anomaly.

But he is not alone: there is also a 9 years old girl - who is the first person able to understand and point out to the scientists what is the Anomaly - and a female TV reporter. Suddenly and emotionless as was the Anomaly's arrival, the reporter kisses the elementary school teacher and a forced and bizarre romance pops out from nothing.

The world described in this book is funny: there is the Europe, which comprises only Paris, London and Switzerland. There is Russia and Japan. And there is something called "Congress of South America" - as if the whole continent (with more than 20 countries) was in fact only one big country. Americans are the good guys; the bad guys are the rest of the world.

And, while I was still waiting to see what was the meaning of the anomaly it just vanished back to the sky, leaving the world and the readers with no answer. I couldn't believe that was already the end of the book. But yes, it was the end of a very short book.

I also had bought (before buying this book) another book from the same author. Now I am really not ansious to start reading it...

I am giving two stars as signal of respect to the author, but I have seen two stars books better than this one.
It is not really a science fiction book; as you may see, if you read it, it is a book about nothing - the unmaterial and ephemeral Anomaly.
4554444
"Unmanned" is a "process" novel written more to celebrate the process of drone technology,  than its protagonists,  or,  the twists and turns in its convoluted plot or its futuristic geegaws. The zany "walk on" secondary characters are far more interesting than the four main characters (Darwin, Keira, Steve and Barbs),  who tend to be one dimensional and shallow.  In certain scenes, the dialogue is strictly government/military issue between the participants, the reader is perplexed by its terms imagining the speaker, a GS 13, with horn rimmed black glasses,  standing there with a plastic pen holder in the shirt pocket. Its one sex scene is robotic, the ending comedic in its chaos. The reviewer was left with: is this in the future or is this now ? If it is now, where has our anonymity disappeared to and why ?