Robots in fiction tend to be far more
fascinating and frightening than robots in fact – R2D2 and the Terminator are much cooler than a small disk that can bump around your living room floor sucking up dust. Fortunately, Vancouver author David Jones considers both in his new survey.

Mighty Robots covers everything from Jacques de Vaucanson’s 18th-century mechanical duck to the nanobots of the future. On the way there are chapters on robot toys, explorers, and warriors, and full-page sidebars on robot movies, from The Day the Earth Stood Still to I Robot, and some unusual robot stories, such as the Internet hoax that put a robot soldier, Boilerplate, in various historical settings.

This book is packed with information, such as how the English marine research device Autosub, which can go to the Arctic and dive to depths of 1,000 metres, runs on 4,700 D-cell batteries. But it is not a book for information geeks, although there is a section on what to buy if you want to build your own robot. The text is light and often humorous, dwelling as much on the stories of what robots can and might be able to do as on how they do it. The reader travels with robots inside volcanoes, to the wreck of the Titanic, and to Mars.

The book is well designed, each chapter being set off with a different-coloured page edging and each section within the chapters begun with a headline and a tiny robot graphic. The illustrations are apt yet not overwhelming, and the captions are informative. The only problem is that the sidebars are annoyingly set in white type on a silver background, which glares and makes the text sometimes difficult to read.

Overall, this is a splendid book that many parents will enjoy as much as the target audience.