Utopia, by Roger MacBride Allen

This is the last installment in a trilogy set in Isaac Asimov's Robots universe. The good old Asimovian robots are governed by three fundamental laws of behavior which ultimately determine their roles in society. The laws state that a robot can never by action or inaction harm a human being, that a robot must always obey orders given by human beings unless they contradict the first law, and finally that a robot must protect its own existence, unless this creates a contradiction to first two laws.

Allen's work has expanded this universe by introducing two other variations of robots. The first is the No-Law robot, which is unconstrained by design, emulating a human being's freedom of will. Only one of these is ever built, Caliban, who is the protagonist of the first novel in the series. The second is the New-Laws robot, which is granted a calculated measure of freedom, but still is designed to never take any direct action that can result in any harm to a human being. The new laws virtually freed the robots from the tyranny of mankind, but still manage to create beings that are bound to collaborate with humans.

The potential for the construction for interesting and exciting stories in this setting is enormous. There are opportunities to explore topics in the impact of technology in society, in what it means to be human, and in what course our species might take in the future. In summary, the setting is excellent in that it is Asimovian to its core.

The first two novels mined this ore with relative success and managed to almost continue the tradition of the Elijah Bailey novel, which was a mixture of whodunit and sci-fi explorations. This third installment, though, fell quite short of the conclusive climax that it could have been. It was by sheer power of will that I managed to finish reading Utopia, which I really wanted to like, but couldn't.

The premises are that the terraformed world of Inferno is doomed to revert back to its original inhospitality. In order to attempt to stabilize the situation, a scientist posits that a controlled comet crash can be used to dig a massive canal on the surface of the planet. The canal would connect two large bodies of water and create a self-regulating mechanism for temperature and moisture on the surface of Inferno. The operation is far from risk-free and requires the collaboration from the robotic contingent of society. The substantial risk, however, interferes directly with the laws that govern robot behavior creating a certain level of tension that carries through to the end of the novel.

I felt that although the plot had certain interesting elements, I never managed to care for anything that happened. I attribute this mainly to the fact that characters are so poorly developed that the reader feels little or no empathy for any of them. The story felt somewhat like a cold collection of conjectures that, although interesting, never spark any passion in the reader.

A Window in Copacabana, by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

Author binge, yes, I'm guilty. This is the fourth book in the "Inspector Espinosa" mystery series. Of all the books I've read in the series, so far, this was the first one that I couldn't crack on my own and I'm happy for that surprise. Espinosa is a great character who develops more and more with every additional book. Garcia-Roza's writing clearly shows a lot of love for the city of Rio de Janeiro and more than being post-cards, his books read like personal invitations to the sensual, seductive city.

An expatriate like me will either find sheer delight in traversing the city with the characters or be struck with sharp pangs of homesickness. Actually, for me the two feelings alternate with even and odd pages.

The story follows a serial killer who wipes out member of the police force and their extramarital affairs. There comes "Inspector" Espinosa to investigate the murders. I'm not sure inspector is the best translation to English of the word delegado from Portuguese, which refers to the head of a precinct, but so be it. I found the end surprising and somewhat satisfying, though a bit rushed. Still, it was a very enjoyable read which I recommend to mystery buffs.

Second Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

When I first read this, about 15 years ago, I saw something much greater and impressive in the first Foundation trilogy. Although I enjoyed the reread and still saw a lot of interesting themes well-explored in this third volume, I feel that I've changed too much to see this with the same eyes of a 25-year old. This is not to say that I think this isn't top notch material, but put in the light of other books I've read in the meantime, Foundation has lost some of its impact on me.

I find it interesting that Foundation starts of as a series of short stories in the first volume, then develops into novellas in the second and third volumes, and starts to coalesce into full-length novels later on. I think this is perhaps an indication that Asimov's vision and ideas for where the story was going matured as he wrote on. I enjoyed the longer books better perhaps because the character became progressively more complex and more interesting. This process of trying to understand how my tastes have changed indicates to me that even more than the clever scientific speculations, I enjoy a story centered in the human element - our conflicts, struggles, and intellectual and emotional developments became more important to me.

With all that said, Second Foundation is still pretty darn good. Of the two novellas in this volume, the second one, in which the search for the Second Foundation finally concludes, is definitely my favorite. The theme of political manipulations of a vast number of worlds under the reign of the Mule in the first novella is interesting enough, but not terribly gripping. In the second one, Arcadia Darell, a fourteen-year old girl becomes the central piece in the unveiling of where in the universe lies the world of the mental manipulators to were prepared to carry through with Hari Seldon's plan. This character, in my opinion, shows that by the time Asimov got to this point in the story, he was confident enough in his writing to entrust the backbone of the story to a human being, a flesh and blood person, who ultimately can be as interesting and exciting as any bit of science. For me, the series only gets better as it goes on.

A Case of Curiosities, by Allen Kurzweil

If Kurzweil writes more, I'll eagerly read it, that's a promise. This was the second novel by him that I picked up and I enjoyed it just as much as The Grand Complication. The book tells the story of Claude Page, a talented young man born to a healing woman in the French countryside in the 18th century.

Southwesterly Wind, by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

Fun, lots of fun. I'm a fan of Garcia-Roza's and got five of his books as a gift in one shot. Since then I've been reading them one by one and discovering that the quality of the writing and the imaginative plots don't waver. This book tells the story of a man who, according to a "prophecy" made on his previous birthday will commit murder within the year. The prophecy took a life of its own when finds the ears of an unsteady, impressionable subject and gravitates slowly towards the inevitable. Before any crime is committed, the would be murdered approaches the police and warns Inspector Espinosa of what may come to happen. What follows then is an excursion in the weaknesses of man in the face of fate with side trips into Freudian theories and religious fanaticism visiting some of my old haunts in the wonderful city of Rio de Janeiro. Even though I, once again, spotted some of the elements of the ending from far away, the details that come with the printed word came as a big surprise. I hope Garcia-Roza keeps writing more and more of these fun books.

Factoring Humanity, by Robert J. Sawyer

After my ups and downs with Sawyer's "Neanderthal Parallax" trilogy and the enjoyment I found in reading his "Flashforward", I thought to read another one of his older books. As I expected, some of his earlier writings are substantially better than his latest and I ended up enjoying very much what he created in "Factoring Humanity".

This book is a story of first contact between humanity and extra-terrestrials, somewhat in the same vein of Carl Sagan's unbeatable Contact. Radiotelescopes on Earth suddenly start picking up signals from Alpha Centauri, which are initially decoded and understood. Further pieces of the message however remain shrouded in mystery for 10 years until a scientist is finally able to figure out its meaning. The decoding of the message changes humanity in a way that I had not seen proposed in any other work of science fiction, so I found this book quite creative and interesting.

A concurrent thread in the story explores the work of another scientist whose research in artificial intelligence and quantum computing run the risk of coming together. Although I found this thread also very interesting, at times I found that it wasn't well integrated with the main plot of this book. In the end, the author does manage to pull the threads together, but I felt that the integration was not terribly smooth and could have been done better.

All in all, this was a fast and satisfying read, but definitely not a masterpieces in the genre. The science is understandable and fairly convincing, what is always a pleasure to find. What was really interesting for me as a faithful Sawyer reader was the recurrence of themes from the "Neanderthal Parallax" trilogy. "Factoring Humanity" was written years earlier and exposes themes such as women in science, sexual abuse, and quantum computing, which featured prominently in the "Neanderthal Parallax". I'm curious to see if his future works will revisit these themes and how.

Foundation and Empire, by Isaac Asimov

This is the second volume in the original Foundation Trilogy. Since it contains only two stories, or rather, novellas (where the first book had five), the overall flow is much less discontinuous.The first story, The General puts psychohistory and the Seldon Plan to the test when an individual attempts to counteract the work of the Foundation. We are told by psychohistory that individuals don't matter in the big scheme of things. Large populations and socio-historical forces have a much greater inertia than the actions of a single person, no matter how powerful that person may be. Bel Riose, a military loyal to the shrinking Empire initiates an offensive against the Foundation attempting to reclaim the worlds that had been lost to Cleo II. Good story with a good pace, but it almost serves only as an appetizer to the main course, The Mule, the second story in the book. The Mule is arguably one of Asimov's masterpieces and sets the stage for the long range development of the Foundation series. It's hard for sci-fi to get much better than this. The story puts in question, one more time, the Seldon plan. It is centered on another individual, a mutant nicknamed "The Mule", who unlike Bel Riose is not an Imperialist. "The Mule" is out to establish an empire of its own and in his campaign he starts to incorporate more and more of the Foundation worlds into his domain. This story has interesting twists and shows that perhaps there were variables unaccounted for in Seldon's psychohistorical plan which could undermine the course plotted in his plan. Also importantly, it brings back into the mix the Second Foundation, which Seldon would have established in a secret location in the galaxy. This story cemented my interest in the Foundation universe and gave me a momentum for going deeper into the series that lasted throughout all the Foundation, Robot, Galactic Empire, and Second Foundation series.