Buy this book
Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.
Isaac Asimov's Inferno is the middle book of Roger MacBride Allen's Caliban trilogy, the authorized Asimov-universe continuation novels written in the early 90s. The conceit is wonderful: the planet Inferno is being slowly terraformed and is being shaken by a new political movement that wants to abandon the Three Laws of Robotics as a cultural foundation. The robot Caliban, designed without the Three Laws as an experiment, has the unique position of being both threat and witness.
Allen takes the Asimov setup seriously enough to do philosophy with it. The book is more interested in what the Three Laws actually mean for individual robotic and human moral life than the original trilogy ever was. Inspector Alvar Kresh, the human detective at the center, is one of the best protagonists in the entire authorized Foundation/Robots extended universe.
Four stars. Allen's Caliban books are some of the few licensed Asimov novels worth reading, and Inferno is the strongest of the three. Read after Caliban, the first in the trilogy.
Related reads
If you liked Isaac Asimov's Inferno
Isaac Asimov's Utopia
by Roger MacBride Allen
The third Caliban novel. Roger MacBride Allen closing out his Asimov continuation trilogy with appropriate political weight.
Allies and Aliens
by Roger MacBride Allen
A Roger MacBride Allen solo SF novel. Two short pieces in one volume, both with the careful diplomacy-first SF sensibility his Asimov books also have.
Orphan of Creation
by Roger MacBride Allen
Roger MacBride Allen's genuinely strange standalone SF novel. An anthropologist uncovers fossil australopithecines on a Mississippi plantation. The book that made Allen's reputation.
The Torch of Honor
by Roger MacBride Allen
The Torch of Honor by Roger MacBride Allen 1985 review. A near-future SF novel about an Earth-led expedition arriving at the colony world of New Finland to find it under Guard occupation.
SuperNova
by Roger MacBride Allen
SuperNova by Roger MacBride Allen 1991 review. A standalone hard-SF novel about a small team of physicists racing to interpret a nearby supernova that arrives ten thousand years earlier than astronomy predicted.
More by this author