Good for cultural understanding, nothing for feminism in here.

This was painful to get through, but bad books often are. I'll admit that the theory of Three Laws of Robotics is sound, and worth investigating, but I did not like what Asimov did with it, not at all.

I lost my patience with the story and Asimov around the second or third time of Mr Weston is referred as the poor man who loved his wife and thus breaks his little girls heart by taking her robot away from her. Which is to say, all was lost within first ten pages of the first story.

Cutting edge science fiction, you guys, with 1950s gender roles! The only excuse in Asimov's favour is that I, Robot was published in 1950.

Then for a moment I thought, the robots could have been a metaphor for race, but I should have known better. There is nothing there but dated visions of advanced technology and flawed logic. And it's even expanded into a series!

Did I mention how badly Asimov writes women? Not only is the wife a villain, the retiring specialist in the frame story is a moody spinster who was foolish enough to fancy a younger man some years ago and who carries apples in her purse for a hungry man's convenience.

It's 2015, People! We can and should do better. Stop reading dead white cis men.

I gave it a good 25% or a little more than 100 kindle pages before giving up.

The book is an odd mix of speculative scifi and badly executed survival-slash-caveman romance. The world-building science infodumbs alternate between lewd malegaze and annoying flashbacks to a potentially interesting take on nu-eugenics that drove the only ship capable of interstellar travel to escape earth.

Thing is, the characters worry about saving enough diverse genetic material to rebuild human population on another planet, or in this case on a moon they crash, but none of the characters either pre or post crash are described as POC.

Another annoying thing is how the survival focus isn't actually on survival or even exploration of their new habitat but powerplay for leadership, which would be natural and could be interesting if done right and not by characters that come across more like vapid pod people than actual human beings.

And none of those points seems to be the crux of the story. No, the point is the badly written love-tetrahedron where three men compete for the titular character Grace.

I could have read it, hadn't it felt like fighting to get through every short paragraph.

I received an Advance Readers Copy of this book.