Drunkard's Walk Forums

This morning my sister-in-law and I were talking about books which we'd read as kids, and which we had been looking for and rereading again as adults. There was one which she'd so far had no luck finding, mainly because her memory of it was so fragmentary. I offered to post a query here, in the hopes someone in the greater international DW Forums community might just recognize the few scraps she remembers and let us know what it actually is. So...

She thinks the title was something like "Rhodium Robots" or "Rhodium-Plated Robots". What little she recalls of the plot revolves around someone creating robots which were so good at what doing everything that humanity essentially died off from ennui or pointlessness or the like. I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting one or two other points; I'll have to check with her and if I did forget something, I'll add it here. In the mean time, I'll just note that she's already done all the common-sense first steps, like google and the like. This is a last-resort, throw a line out at random kind of thing.

Thanks.

My first guess is Rossum's Universal Robots.....

.... which gave us the term 'Robot' in the first place. Where the Robots revolted and exterminated mankind that'd grown lazy.

No, my sister-in-law is savvy enough to know if it were "R.U.R." Besides, this is likely to be a children's book or YA novel, given the age at which she read it.

Thanks anyway.

If you hadn't said "YA", I'd have thought it was Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands". The phlebotinum of the story is called "rhodomagnetics", after all.

EDIT: Then again, I found the novella in my high school's library, so it might be considered to be YA...

(11-26-2023, 09:49 AM)robkelk Wrote: [ -> ]If you hadn't said "YA", I'd have thought it was Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands". The phlebotinum of the story is called "rhodomagnetics", after all.

EDIT: Then again, I found the novella in my high school's library, so it might be considered to be YA...

I was trying to remember the name of that book.

For me, I read the copy from my junior high school's library, so I'll add another data point to the "plausible to regard this as YA" column.

(11-26-2023, 09:49 AM)robkelk Wrote: [ -> ]If you hadn't said "YA", I'd have thought it was Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands". The phlebotinum of the story is called "rhodomagnetics", after all.

EDIT: Then again, I found the novella in my high school's library, so it might be considered to be YA...

I read that one at high school age. I found it in one of Ben Bova's collections of great pre-Nebula awards science fiction though I can't remember the title of said collection. Williamson went on to write a bunch of other stories in that setting like The Humanoid Touch. (The robots were called "humanoids.")

Well, I passed the suggestion on to her in email last night, we'll see if it gets a thumbs up or down.

So rather than relying on faulty memory, I decided to see if I could find the collection I read "With Folded Hands" in on Amazon given that I remember the editor's name. This is what I came up with: https://www.amazon.com/Science-Fiction-H...c47c48c32f

I think that's the right volume. IIRC, Volume 1 was short stories and novelettes.