Kaldor City Books 1-7 – Alan Stevens, Jim Smith, Chris Boucher, Jim Smith, Fiona Moore, and Alistair Lock Free Audiobook

Written by Alan Stevens, Jim Smith, Chris Boucher, Jim Smith, Fiona Moore, and Alistair Lock
Read by Full Cast
Format: MP3
Dramatization

Kaldor City is a major city “on a corrupt world governed by an all-powerful Company, where the rich scheme in mansions filled with robot slaves, the poor scrabble for survival in the Sewerpits, the Security forces are out of control and terrorism is a daily fact of life”.[1] The city was first mentioned in The Robots of Death as the home base of a “storm mine” touring the desert searching for and mining precious minerals from within the sands, with the crew working on commission for the Company.

The society shown in The Robots of Death is one where higher class “founding families” (presumably a reference to the families that founded the colony planet) have hit financial difficulties and are forced to work with (and sometimes subordinate to) citizens who have achieved their power, influence and wealth through their own hard work and scheming. This has led to a certain amount of resentment between the new and old money, reflecting the decline in the financial power of the gentry in England. The society is also highly reliant on the use of robots at all levels, with three class of robots being used: Dum robots are for menial work and are unable to speak; Voc robots are the next level up and can speak and have limited reasoning capabilities; Super-Voc robots are the most advanced robots, and can be used to monitor complex activities including the day to day activities of other, lower class robots. Each robot is given a designation based on its class (for example D-84 is a Dum class robot and SV-7 is a Super-Voc) and is programmed with a variant on Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.

The society is not entirely comfortable with the use of robots, and the machines’ humanoid design but complete lack of emotion and body language have given rise to a mental disorder called Robo-Phobia. This is shown as a paranoid delusion that robots are actually the living dead, intent on harming humans. The Robots of Death also shows us that it is possible to reprogram robots so that they can break the restrictions on them harming humans, as robotics genius Taren Capel has discovered in his attempts to free his robot “brothers” from their slavery.