Caliban Trilogy book 1

"The Spacer-Settler struggle was at its beginning, and at its end, an ideological
contest...Always, whether acknowledged or not, there was one issue at the center
of every confrontation between the two sides: robots. One side regarded them as
the ultimate good, while the other saw them as the ultimate evil...

It was on Inferno, one of the smallest, weakest, most fragile of the Spacer
worlds, that Spacer and Settler made one of the boldest attempts to work together.
The people of that world, who called themselves Infernals, found themselves facing
two crises. All knew about their ecological difficulties, though few understood
their severity. Settler experts in terraforming were called in to deal with that.

But it was the second crisis, the hidden crisis, that proved the greater danger.
For unbeknownst to themselves, the Infernals and the Settlers on that aptly named
world were forced to face a remarkable change in the very nature of robots
themselves..."

So begins - about 100 years after the events in "Robots and Empire" - "Isaac Asimov's
Caliban", by Roger MacBride Allen. Writing a set of three novels "peopled" by robots
with Shakespearean names (especially from "The Tempest") the author surely must have
had in the back of his mind Miranda's exclamation: "O brave new world, That has such
people in't!" Readers may well imagine Susan Calvin spinning in her grave!

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