so, i have to finish up this week's readings with the bicentennial man, which is a collection of short stories that are mostly in the complete robot and, therefore, mostly already dealt with. but, there's a handful of loose stories to catalogue here, none particularly interesting.

i wanted to do this last night, but i found myself very emotionally unsettled yesterday and had to spend some time sleeping it off. 

- prime of life: pointless poem

- waterclap: an aimless, nerdy discourse between an astronaut and a deep-sea explorer opens up into an evil plot by the astronaut to destroy the deep-sea vessel, and some quick thinking to talk the astronaut out of it. it's clever, but pointless.

- the life and times of multivac: what asimov is actually doing in this piece is trolling the new york times, who asked him for something profound. it's pretentious, but it's not profound. freedom is a difficult concept, but it's hard to take the premise that asimov thought we'd be freer without robots seriously, given his body of work. is there something tongue-in-cheek to this, then? some existentialist slant? i think it's mostly just empty troll... 

- the winnowing: asimov talks a lot about population control, and i'm sure it's created some whispers, even if the smart kids could always work it out without needing much help. so, i think he sort of had to write this short, ironic tale of a scientist chosen to create a population control virus using it on the population controllers, instead. and, again, this is a curious read in the context of the covid-19 pandemic. 

- marching in: this is a sarcastic joke, but i like it, and it's true - music is the best therapy there is.

- old fashioned: a space ship gets stuck in a black hole and sends an sos using morse code by tossing objects into the black hole. it's an interesting few pages, but it's not much of a story.

- birth of a notion: pointless nonsense

and, that's the third text this week....

i'm probably not going to get a chance to do any write-ups this morning, but we'll see. if i don't get any done this week, i'll get to the last two robot novels on friday.