Posts Tagged ‘short stories’

Robot Dreams is a compilation of short stories by Isaac Asimov. It contains a mixture of his work, including the robot series, but also the multivac series, and unrelated science fiction stories. A few I had already read in The Complete Robot but most were new to me.

I think I enjoyed the book slightly more than The Complete Robot as a lot of the stories felt more polished. Overall, I remain more a fan of his full-length novels than his short stories, though both are good.

The story the book is named after, Robot Dreams is actually one of the worst stories in the book, in my opinion. There does not seem to be a satisfactory motive or conclusion to it.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s next set of short shorties, “The Return of Sherlock Holmes”, sees Sherlock Holmes turn out to be alive. Not much of a surprise given Watson merely assumed Holmes must have fallen off the waterfall and went on with his life without really doing that much checking.

I found the stories to be increasingly more engaging. While the mysteries were not any better than the previous set of short stories, the writing had continue to improve from the earliest works and maintained my interest throughout.