Isaac Asimov's Utopia

Roger MacBride Allen

1996

Alvar Kresh has been Governor for five years now and the reterraforming of Inferno looked like it was going well. However, those in charge knew that the situation was poised on a knife-edge. All their hard won gains could be wiped out if those controlling the terraforming took their attention off the situation for a moment.

When Kresh's attention is brought to bear on the possibility of crash landing fragments of a comet into the planet to provide it with the necessary northern ocean he knows the risks. But the risks of doing nothing were equally high. It quickly becomes a three-way fight between government forces, the Settler terraforming teams and Simcor Beddle's Ironheads but when an attempted kidnapping goes catastrophically wrong both the Settlers and Ironheads come to a reluctant support of the project. However, there is a third group opposed to the proposed landing site. The New Law robots' hidden city, Valhalla, lay directly underneath the impact point of the comet!

As the final minutes before impact tick away, it's left to Caliban, the detested No Law robot, to save Simcor Beddle from the mad designs of Prospero who had been driven crazy by conflicts in his New Law programming.

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