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.