Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition)

by James Gunn

  Foundations should be solid. They should leave no important areas uncovered. That The Foundation Trilogy is so solid may be the major reason it has survived and why so many later science-fiction stories have been built upon the "central myth" that it and earlier works pioneered.

  3 Variations Upon a Robot

  Isaac Asimov's I, Robot has become one of the enduring titles in the canon of contemporary science fiction. Asimov's robot stories were the second of the two basic kinds of fiction with which he built his early reputation, the first being The Foundation Trilogy. Like the Trilogy, I, Robot, has seldom been out of print since its 1950 book publication by Gnome Press. It has sold several million copies in hardcover and paperback and has elicited persistent interest from filmmakers, most recently in the late 1970s and 1980s with a script by Harlan Ellison that suffered the usual Hollywood complications. Ellison's script was serialized in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in 1987 and published as a book in 1994.

  Asimov did not stop writing robot stories after the publication of I, Robot, as he did with the Foundation stories after the publication of the Trilogy. Another group of stories was published by Doubleday in 1964 as The Rest of the Robots, including three stories that were written early in Asimov's career but published in magazines other than Astounding, so Asimov did not think them suitable for inclusion in I, Robot. The remainder of the eight stories in The Rest of the Robots had been published after 1950. Asimov continued to return to the robots as new ideas occurred to him or editors requested new stories. His final two robot collections, collecting all of his robot stories and 16 of his essays about robots, were Robot Dreams, packaged for Ace Books in 1986 by Byron Preiss, and Robot Visions, packaged for Roc Books in 1990 by Byron Preiss.

  Asimov wrote nearly 40 robot stories, so many that they could not be reprinted in a single volume. Some were tossed off casually, but others added significantly to the intellectual and emotional consideration of the robot that Asimov began in 1939.

  Asimov's interest in robots and his readers' interest in Asimov's robots provide useful insights into how science fiction was changing in the 1940s under the influence of the new editor at Astounding, John W. Campbell. The fiction began to reflect science as it was practiced then and might be practiced in the future, and scientists as they really were or might become.

  In the introduction to The Rest of the Robots Asimov wrote:

  . . . one of the stock plots of science fiction was that of the invention of a robot usually pictured as a creature of metal without soul or emotion. Under the influence of the well-known deeds and ultimate fate of Frankenstein and Rossum, there seemed only one change to be rung on this plot. Robots were created and destroyed their creator; robots were created and destroyed their creator: robots were created and destroyed their creator

  In the 1930s I became a science-fiction reader and I quickly grew tired of this dull hundred-times-told tale. As a person interested in science, I resented the purely Faustian interpretation of science.

  Asimov went on to point out that nothing is made without taking into account the dangers involved: knives have hilts, stairs have banisters, electrical wiring has insulation, pressure cookers have safety valves. "Sometimes the safety achieved is insufficient because of limitations imposed by the nature of the universe or the nature of the human mind. However, the effort is there." If a robot is considered as another artifact, Asimov reasoned, engineers would have built in safeguards. And so he began to write robot stories but of a new variety. "My robots were machines designed by engineers, not pseudo-men created by blasphemers. My robots reacted along rational lines that existed in their `brains' from the moment of construction."

  Asimov's robot stories represent one of the longer continuous considerations of that phenomenon, or perhaps of any fictional phenomenon: it stretched from the writing of "Robbie" in 1939 to the publication of "Robot Dreams" in 1986 and "Robot Visions" in 1990. That span allowed Asimov to think about robots in many different ways and the scholar to study how Asimov's attitudes and ideas changed, but the manner in which the stories were written also inhibits the scholar from judging, except in the most general sense, the stories as a unified whole. They were created individually and they must be considered individually. Each builds upon earlier stories and all share certain assumptions, but all but a few were written without thought for their places in any overall scheme. In fact, the best way to think about them may be as variations upon a theme.

  The beginning, and the book basic to the entire series of stories, was I, Robot. The title represents an initial irony, since it is also the title of a story by Eando Binder (a pseudonym for Earl and Otto Binder, used after 1940 by Otto alone). The publication of Binder's story in Amazing, January 1939, and a chance meeting with Otto on May 7 of the same year at the Queens Science Fiction League inspired Asimov's first robot story. In 1950, when Martin Greenberg of Gnome Press was preparing to publish the book, Greenberg dismissed Asimov's suggested title, Mind and Iron (a phrase used in the introduction), and suggested I, Robot. Asimov said that was impossible because of Binder's earlier story. "Fuck Eando Binder," Greenberg said, and I, Robot it was. Asimov credits the title with helping to sell the book. As a further irony, the book contains no first-person robot stories. The book consists of nine stories united not only by their concern with robots but by the introduction and a continuing narrative between stories, which was constructed, for the book, as an interview by a reporter for Interplanetary Press with Susan Calvin when she reaches the age of seventy-five. The linking narrative also functions as an account of the difficulties and successes of United States Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. (hereafter abbreviated as USR) and a history of robotics itself, since Calvin joined USR as a robopsychologist upon earning her Ph.D. in cybernetics. In the process of bringing the stories together, Asimov provided dates that were missing from the original versions.1 Out of them I have derived the following chronology of events:

  1982

  Susan Calvin is born. The same year Lawrence Robertson founds USR.

  1996

  "Robbie" is constructed as a non-speaking robot and sold to the Weston family as a nursemaid for Gloria.

  1998

  "Robbie" ("Strange Playfellow"), Super Science Stories, September 1940. New York passes curfew law for robots.

  2002

  Dr. Alfred Lanning demonstrates a mobile, speaking robot (intended for the mines of Mercury) in a psychomath seminar. Susan Calvin is present.

  2003

  Calvin earns bachelor's degree.

  2003-2007

  Use of robots is banned on Earth because of opposition by labor unions and fundamentalist religious groups.

  2007

  Calvin earns her Ph.D. and joins USR as "the first great practitioner of a new art," robopsychology. Lanning is director of research. USR has hit a financial low point and is forced to turn to the extraterrestrial market. Robots are about twelve feet tall, clumsy, and not much good.

  1. Some confusion in dates remains: the Introduction says that Susan Calvin joined USR in 2008; she says, in the lead-in to "Runaround," that it was 2007. "Runaround" also refers to fifty-year-old antique mounts (robots).

  Circa 2007 The First Mercury Expedition. Robots try to help build the mining station there, but the effort fails.

  Teens and Twenties Gregory Powell and Michael Donovan handle most of the difficult robotics cases.

  2015

  "Runaround," Astounding, March 1942. The Second Mercury Expedition. USR has developed a new type of robot, SPD-13 ("Speedy").

  2015 1/2

  "Reason," Astounding, April 1941. USR has developed a new kind of robot, QT-1 ("Cutie"), to direct energy beams from Sun to Earth from solar stations.

  2016

  "Catch That Rabbit," Astounding, February 1944. USR has developed a master robot, DV-5 ("Davie"), which controls six sub-robots, for asteroid mining.

  2021

  "Liar!," Astounding, May 1941. USR creates a robot, RB-34 ("H
erbie"), which has the accidental ability to read minds.

  2029

  "Little Lost Robot," Astounding, March 1947. Work is progressing (in a station situated in the asteroid belt) on a hyperatomic drive for interstellar travel. USR creates an experimental group of robots, NS-2 ("Nestors"), some of which are not impressioned with the entire First Law of Robotics so that they can work with scientists who are involved in dangerous research.

  2029 or 2030

  "Escape" ("Paradoxical Escape"), Astounding, August 1945. "The Brain," a larger positronic robot brain installed as a computer, makes possible interstellar travel by suppressing its anxiety about the temporary death of human passengers in the "hyperspace" Jump.

  2032

  "Evidence," Astounding, September 1946. Humanoid robots are possible and may have been constructed.

  2052

  "The Evitable Conflict," Astounding, June 1950. The world is unified under a "World Coordinator," and the world's economy is entirely under the control of giant computers called "The Machines."

  2064

  Susan Calvin dies.

  Little more information than that sketched above is provided about the world in which I, Robot exists because little more is necessary for the understanding of the basic narrative. That narrative is about robots and the problems people have with them in spite of the precautions engineers have taken in constructing them. The most important precaution, and probably the single most important contribution to the success of the robot stories, is the Three Laws of Robotics.2

  2. The word "robotics" was invented by Asimov although he didn't realize it at the time. He said that if he was to be remembered at all in future years it would be for the Three Laws of Robotics.

  Asimov was not the first to write about robots. As he pointed out in The Rest of the Robots, Homer, in The Iliad, described Hephaestus being served by maidens he had created from gold as mechanical, thinking creatures. There were other robot predecessors: Talos, the bull-headed man made of bronze, who guarded Crete for King Minos; a Golem molded of clay by various medieval rabbis3 and animated by a "shem" or name of God; Roger Bacon's talking brazen head; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's monster (1818); and Karel Capek's robots in his 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which introduced the Czech word for forced worker or slave, "robot," into the language. But every robot up to Asimov's time, virtually without exception, turned against its creator, and it was this tradition against which Asimov was rebelling.

  3. In 1970 Professor Marvin Minksy (in "The Bicentennial Man" there is a robopsychologist named Merton Mansky) of the M.I.T. project on artificial intelligence spoke at the SFWA Nebula Award banquet about his work and the help that writers such as Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke had provided in laying out the chain of development from the Golem to the provision of teleological goals. Asimov got up and responded that the thought that had been running through his mind was, "What kind of goals would a Golem have if a Golem could have goals?"

  The trend had begun to turn, however, even before Asimov's first robot story. Lester del Rey's "Helen O'Loy," published in Astounding in December 1938, described a robot created as so much like a person that she falls in love and eventually makes an ideal wife for her creator. Binder's robot, Adam Link, was a noble creature moved by a strong sense of honor and love. His brain was constructed of "iridium sponge," those of Asimov's robots, "a spongy globe of platinumiridium." And Binder's Adam Link stories a total of ten of them continued to appear in Amazing throughout 1939, 1940, 1941, and 1942 (seven of them were collected in Adam Link Robot, published by Paperback Library in 1965). In "Adam Link's Vengeance," published in February 1940, the robot thinks, ''A robot must never kill a human of his own free will."

  No doubt there are other robot predecessors and even other stories in which resemblances to I, Robot are clear. The purpose in citing them, however, is not to detract from Asimov's accomplishments but to point out debts that he himself was quick to acknowledge (though he might not have realized the full extent of them; a magnificent memory may not always be an asset, and Asimov occasionally discovered, to his horror in the case of "Green Patches," that he was reworking someone else's idea). When Asimov showed "Robbie" to his friend and fellow Futurian, Frederik Pohl, the 20-year-old Pohl, already working as a part-time agent and full-time editor and writer, told him (correctly) that Campbell would reject it because it was too reminiscent of "Helen O'Loy." Amazing rejected it as well because it was too similar to "I, Robot," which they had published just six months before (and the editor must have had Binder's "The Trial of Adam Link" already in type for the July issue). Pohl himself published "Robbie" in Super Science Stories.

  "Robbie" set up many of the conflicts that later pervaded I, Robot and even the entire series of robot stories. In the story, the Westons have bought Robbie as a nursemaid for their daughter Gloria because, as her mother says, "It was a novelty; it took a load off me, and and it was a fashionable thing to do." Two years later, however, Mrs. Weston wanted to sell the robot back to the company. "She [Gloria] won't play with anyone else"; "I won't have my daughter entrusted to a machine and I don't care how clever it is. It has no soul, and no one knows what it may be thinking. A child just isn't made to be guarded by a thing of metal''; "and . . . something might go wrong. . . . Some little jigger will come loose and the awful thing will go berserk. . . ." George Weston protests: "A robot is infinitely more to be trusted than a human nursemaid. . . . Robbie was constructed for only one purpose really to be the companion of a little child. His entire `mentality' has been created for the purpose. He just can't help being faithful and loving and kind. He's a machine made so. That's more than you can say for humans." Nevertheless, George surrenders to his wife's persistence, only to reunite the inconsolable Gloria with Robbie at the end.

  Other problems besides unreasoning opposition to robots run through the robot series: 1) human resentment of robots (Asimov calls it "the Frankenstein complex") and the difficulties of introducing robots on Earth; 2) determining what is good for people; 3) the difficulties of giving a robot unambiguous instructions; 4) the distinctions among robots and between robots and people and the difficulties in telling robots and people apart; 5) the superiority of robots to people; and also 6) the superiority of people to robots.

  Asimov rearranged the order of the stories when they were published in I, Robot. He also made some small editorial changes for consistency. "Reason," for instance, was placed third in the book although it was written and published second, before the codification of the Three Laws.

  Pleased by the appearance of "Strange Playfellow" ("Robbie") in print, Asimov decided to "press Campbell's buttons" by using a religious motif in a robot story. Campbell responded as Asimov had hoped, asking Asimov to write the story for him and buying it immediately. It was the first Asimov robot story to appear in Astounding. "Reason" incorporated two of Campbell's editorial preferences: a philosophic concern with religion Cutie deduces by "pure reason" that he could not have been constructed by such inferior beings as Donovan and Powell but must have been created by the most powerful thing around, the energy convertor, which he therefore reasons to be a god and a pragmatic conclusion. When Cutie handles the energy beam perfectly, even through an "electron" storm, the two engineers decide to leave him with his delusion and even to ship other QT models to the station to be indoctrinated with the religious belief that works so well. "Liar!," the third robot story written by Asimov, incorporated the Three Laws of Robotics for the first time.4 Campbell had suggested the Three Laws during a discussion that preceded the writing of the story, and Asimov codified them:

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

  2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

  Typically, Asimov always
insisted that Campbell originated the laws, and Campbell always said that they were implicit in Asimov's stories and discussions. Whatever the exact truth of origin, the Three Laws, as Asimov noted in his autobiography, "revolutionized science fiction":

  Once they were established in a series of stories, they made so much sense and proved so popular with the readers that other writers began to use them. They couldn't quote them directly, of course, but they could simply assume their existence, knowing well that the readers would be acquainted with the Laws and would understand the assumption.

  Campbell may have worked more intuitively than through conscious theory, but what he wanted was a rational inspection of all premises; a movement away from traditional responses, primarily emotional and irrational, toward pragmatism; and the construction of new and more logical systems of operation. Campbell, as a writer, also may have perceived the fictional opportunities the Laws of Robotics would provide.

  As Asimov noted in The Rest of the Robots, "There was just enough ambiguity in the Three Laws to provide the conflicts and uncertainties required for new stories, and, to my great relief, it seemed always to be possible to think up a new angle out of the sixty-one words of the Three Laws."