A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities is a thoroughly enjoyable story, with enough action and colour to keep the modern reader entertained.  Highly recommended for those who don't mind stepping outside their own contemporary culture from time to time for some good old-fashioned story-telling.

This novel was first published in 1859 and is set in the years leading up to and immediately following the French Revolution in 1789.  

It tells the tale of Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat who has renounced his patrimony, and his look-alike Sydney Carton, an Englishman who has dissipated his money and talents on alcohol.  Their stories are bound up with those of Dr Manette and his daughter Lucie. The action switches back and forth between a staid and conservative London and a Paris caught up in revolutionary turmoil.

The novel is a brief one by Dickens' standards.  Even so, Dickens is able to tell a tangled tale of intrigue, deceit, loyalty and redemption against a well-drawn historical backdrop. The action rarely flags, and new developments come thick and fast.

Also unlike many of Dickens' stories, most of the characters in A Tale of Two Cities have an interesting psychological depth to them, rather than being stock characters.  Assisting the main actors are Mr Jarvis Lorry, who hides his compassionate nature behind the thin veneer of a dispassionate businessman; the tough and gruff Jerry Cruncher who is an errand runner by day and a resurrection man by night; Monsieur and Madame DeFarge who run an underground revolutionary movement from their Paris tavern; and then there is the poor peasant Gaspard, who suffers a grievous outrage at the hands of the French aristocracy.

I thoroughly enjoyed A Tale of Two Cities.  I read the Penguin Classics eBook version, which contains a very informative introductory essay by Richard Maxwell.

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

1984 has come and gone, as has 2001.  Orwell's future vision of the western hemisphere being suffocated by a totalitarian regime didn't come to pass, nor have we sent a manned mission to Jupiter per Arthur C. Clarke's schedule for the future.  Nope, the years have come and gone.

It is now over seventy years since Isaac Asimov started writing stories about robots, and over sixty years since I, Robot was first published.  This book contains nine interlinked short stories that cover the period from 1996 to 2044.  So how has Asimov's vision of the future held up, now that some of it is in the past?

Well, he got pretty close in one respect: in Asimov's 1996, android robots serve as domestic help in suburban households; in our 2014, just 22 years behind schedule, those of us who are so inclined can buy automated vacuum cleaners.  Not an android by any means (they look like  Frisbees on wheels) but we are getting there - a Japanese corporation has developed an android that has a self-contained power unit, can walk and run with an upright gait and can talk interactively with humans.  How long before it becomes an affordable household wonder-drudge?

I, Robot contains nine short stories which are linked by a brief introduction and interludes in which Dr Susan Calvin, a  septuagenarian robopsychologist, relates her experiences with robots to an unnamed journalist who is writing an article about their history. 

As Dr Calvin is a robopsychologist she is an expert on the three laws of robotics that are hard-wired into every positronic brain and that control robotic psychology and behaviour:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Her stories relate to how some odd, amusing and even perilous incidents happened when the robots were placed in psychologically ambiguous circumstances.  For robots and humans alike, there are moral problems to be worked through. 

Asimov has been able to create a very compelling set of stories whilst remaining true to the three laws.  His style of story-telling may be a bit old-fashioned - the characters tend to be a bit 2-D, with too many of them being cranky and cantankerous - but it is still effective, and the cleverness of the stories make up for the deficiencies in the style.