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Time Was

Isaac Asimov's I-Bots

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

A team of human-like super robots are on the run from an evil CEO in this science fiction action adventure based on an original idea by Isaac Asimov.
Annabelle Donohoe, the CEO of World Tech, is mad as hell. Her dreams of world domination died the day Zac Robillard discovered her evil plans and fled World Tech, taking his greatest creation, his beloved I-Bots, and all his research, with him. (Read about their origins in Isaac Asimov’s History of I-Bots!) More than super-machines, more than robots, the I-Bots are eerily human in appearance, but not in abilities. Their genetic components—based on human DNA—and mechanical infrastructures give them physical strength and powers humans can only imagine, and a measure of free will impossible in robots.
Annabelle wants them back and will stop at nothing to get her way, including hiring the world's deadliest assassin to find Zac, and his I-Bots—the beautiful Radiant and Killaine, clever Itazura, Psy-4, and Stonewall—and bring them in . . . or kill them. For if Annabelle cannot have the I-Bots, she vows that no one else can either. But Janus, the ruthless killer, is not the only hunter they must elude . . .
Surrounded by enemies, Zac and the I-Bots can find no safe place, not even the streets. In the year 2013, the Silver Metal Stompers, a neo-Nazi gang, roam the nation’s cities wreaking havoc on robots, especially Scrappers, outmoded homeless robots who huddle in hobo camps, rusting away unless they are repaired by a mysterious humanitarian and robotarian called DocScrap. In an unlucky twist of fate, the Stompers discover DocScrap is none other than Zac Robillard and that the I-Bots aren’t exactly human . . . and vow to crush Zac and the I-Bots into wreckage . . .
Based on an original concept by Isaac Asimov, Time Was is a nonstop action adventure combining all the excitement of Golden Age SF with the technological wonders of modern cybernetics and quantum science.
This remarkable collaboration between the greatest science fiction genius of all time and a team of brilliant young writers is a major publishing event. Only the Grand Master himself could have foreseen the awesome wonders depicted in Isaac Asimov’s I-Bots. And only today’s finest storytellers could have brought them so vividly to life.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 1, 1998
      In the manner of the ongoing series extending Asimov's Foundation novels (Gregory Benford's Foundation's Fear, etc.) comes this pastiche based on the late, great SF master's Three Laws of Robotics. Set in the early 21st century, the novel features five I-Bots, robots as psychologically complex as humans and therefore less bound than their brethren by the Three Laws. The robots find it unendurable to be used as professional assassins, however--and exceedingly difficult to escape the corporate power trippers who wish to use them that way. The robots here are well drawn, and the action scenes are as intense, vivid and bloody as readers have come to expect from Perry (The Digital Effect, etc.), here writing with Braunbeck (Things Left Behind). But the mayhem is not well integrated into a coherent story, and it creates a tone very unlike that laid down by Asimov's relentless rationality. The story also depends heavily for its emotional impact on the tension between the I-Bots' independence of mind and the Three Laws. Those laws were a seminal SF concept in their time, 50 years ago, but they have long since been overtaken in both SF and in real-world cybernetics, and are possibly not well known by many younger SF readers. This is a good example of a pastiche that exhibits much competence but that doesn't quite succeed as either homage to the original author or as an independent development of his themes.

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