THE ROBOT BOOK

With their flashing black and silver covers these two robot assemblages even look alike, though the Push Pin design for Malone's entry is zappier, with a color page of printed circuits showing through the mechanical cover man's cutout eyeballs. Both are replete with pictures--of old machines, mechanical toys, scenes from plays, movie stills, art works, covers from the early sci-fi pulps, computers of all generations--and in fact the Malone is mostly pictures and captions, with a running column of text that functions chiefly as an automatic scanner of robot-related landmarks. More substantial, the Geduld & Gottesman is essentially an anthology of robot literature, beginning with Chaim Bloch's account of the making of Rabbi Loew's golem in 1580 and Mary Shelley's own account of the making of Frankenstein's monster, and drawing also from Poe, Samuel Butler, Arthur C. Clarke, and Carl Sagan--as well as the Ziff-Smart controversy as to whether robots can have feelings. One, coffee-table softwear; the other, a browsable resource: both are high in signal strength as YA attention-getters.