Popular Science Review - Ultimate Robot

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Review - Ultimate Robot - Robert Malone

This is a strange book that defies classification.

Being DK it's highly illustrated and glossy - it's aimed at adults, but shares a lot with the house style for children's books, particularly in covering almost all topics in a two page spread.

It's perhaps significant that the first of the four sections of the book is on robot toys and collectables. It then goes on to cover DIY robot construction kits, robots in art and entertainment and finally, in the "robots: the new generation" section, real and future robots.

That structure makes it clear that this is much more a book about robots as cultural icons than about the science and technology of robotics. That's why it scores fairly low - it's not a bad book - in fact, looking at it from the cultural aspect it's great. The toys, especially the old tinplate robots are superb (amazingly there's a Japanese toy dating back to the mid-1930s), and the movie references always interesting (if technically not always accurate - e.g. calling daleks, more properly cyborgs, robots). Sadly the book was just a little early to take in the recent movie Robots.

The focus is unashamedly on humanoid robots. Although the vast majority of real present day robots are anything but humanoid, these industrial machines only get a single two page spread.

While criticising the serious content of this book is definitely in the "breaking a butterfly on a wheel" category, it is a shame there isn't more than 8 pages of introductory text. This could easily have been expanded to 20-30 pages without damaging the effectiveness of the rest of the book, and that would have given much more opportunity to explore artificial intelligence, humanoid versus function, robots in written fiction (the obvious gap in the major headings) and more. Still, it's a visually striking and highly entertaining book.

Only in hardback

Reviewed by Jo Reed

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