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

by James Gunn

  More important are the philosophic implications of the Three Laws. In "Runaround," for instance, Speedy is in the position of a human who has been ordered to perform an important task but who discovers that doing it will endanger his life. A human might not exhibit his conflict in a fashion so cleverly balanced between a command that must be obeyed and a danger that must be avoided, but the circle he inscribes around the selenium pool shows an understanding of human nature that a soldier cowering in a shell hole might not. Cutie has the characteristics of many prophets, finding his certitude in Platonic introspection rather than scientific evidence; and his analysis suggests to the reader, in passing, how improbable are the universe and the life itself that we take for granted. By the time Asimov reached the writing of "Evidence," the comparisons between robots and humans had become overt.

  Susan Calvin points out:

  ". . . if you stop to think about it, the three Rules of Robotics are the essential guiding principles of a good many of the world's ethical systems. Of course, every human being is supposed to have the instinct of self-preservation. That's Rule Three to a robot. Also every good human being, with a social conscience and a sense of responsibility, is supposed to defer to proper authority; to listen to his doctor, his boss, his government, his psychiatrist, his fellow man; to obey laws, to follow rules, to conform to custom even when they interfere with his comfort or his safety. That's Rule Two to a robot. Also, every good human being is supposed to love others as himself, protect his fellow man, risk his life to save another. That's Rule One to a robot. To put it simply if Byerley follows all the Rules of Robotics, he may be a robot, and may simply be a very good man."

  Clearly, as she herself states in the same story, Susan Calvin likes robots considerably better than human beings. By the end of the book, so may the reader.

  The story of the robots does not end here. Asimov continued his exploration of the theme with three stories published in magazines other than Astounding in the 1940-50 period, and almost two dozen more scattered over the following 40 years, some of them casual notions, others better than most if not all the stories in I, Robot. The first group of eight was published in The Rest of the Robots in 1964.

  "Robot AL-76 Goes Astray," Amazing, February 1942, presents a confused robot. It was built to work in the mines of the airless moon with a disintegrator (called a Disinto). Somehow it gets lost on Earth and makes a Disinto out of scrap and two flashlight batteries, only to be told by a frightened human to destroy it and forget about it completely. AL-76 is confused, but not as confused as the people who are afraid of him.

  "Victory Unintentional," Super Science Stories, August 1942, is a sequel to "Not Final!" an Astounding story that presented the threat of a teeming, xenophobic civilization on Jupiter. In "Victory Unintentional" a robot expedition lands on Jupiter. The robots are taken by the Jovians to be humans and prove so superior to the Jovians that the Jovian superiority complex crumbles.

  "First Law," Fantastic Universe, October 1946, is a casual short-short and a tall tale about a robot (of the MA series) that breaks the First Law because it is a mother, and mother love supersedes every other law.

  "Let's Get Together," Infinity, February 1957, describes a stalemate between East and West that is unbalanced by a report that the East has developed a superior ability to manufacture humanoid robots. Ten of them reportedly are in the U.S. carrying fragments of a TC (total conversion) bomb. A big scientific conference is to consider the problem, but as the scientists are gathering, the Chief of the Bureau of Robotics decides that the meeting is the means for bringing the humanoids together and wiping out the scientific minds of the West.

  "Satisfaction Guaranteed," Amazing, April 1951, is a story that might have qualified for I, Robot. In an attempt to make robots acceptable on Earth (and in the home), USR makes TN-3 ("Tony"), "a tall and darkly handsome" humanoid. It turns out to be a perfect household servant, not only helpful but creative, redecorating the house and the mistress of the house. By seeming to fall in love with her, Tony also restores her sense of adequacy. Susan Calvin comments that "machines can't fall in love, but even when it's hopeless and horrifying women can."

  "Risk," Astounding, May 1955, returns to the scene of "Little Lost Robot," Hyper Base, where the search for a hyper-space interstellar drive has achieved success except that animals come back mindless. A robot is placed in an experimental ship, but at the appointed time nothing happens. Over strenuous objections, Susan Calvin sends a man to investigate rather than a robot. He discovers that the robot, instructed only to pull the control bar firmly toward him, pulled it with robot strength and bent it. The point of the story, however, is that a man was sent rather than a robot, not because human life is valued less but because a robot can't be useful unless it can be given precise orders. It can't be asked to "find out what's wrong." The story is even more meaningful today, when almost everyone has had experience with the exactness with which computer commands must be typed.

  "Lenny," Infinity, January 1958, begins with a child accidentally inserting random programming into a new LNE ("Lenny") model. Lenny turns out to behave like an infant. Susan Calvin says that Lenny has great promise because it is teachable, but it raises First Law fears when it breaks an employee's arm trying to ward off a blow, as it turns out. Susan protects Lenny, pointing out that the robot did not know its own strength and could not yet differentiate between good and evil. Moreover, it will help to solve the problem of getting young people interested in robotics by adding the spice of danger. Perhaps more important, she feels motherly "toward the only kind of baby she could ever have or love."

  "Galley Slave," Galaxy, December 1957, takes up the problem of mental drudgery. USR introduces a proofreading robot, EZ-27 ("Easy"). A few months later Professor Simon Ninheimer, opposed to the idea of leasing Easy at the beginning, sues USR because Easy inserted embarrassing mistakes into Ninheimer's new book. Easy has a block against talking about the problem. The robot is brought into the courtroom as Ninheimer is describing how badly his reputation has been injured by Easy's action, and Easy rises to speak. Ninheimer shouts that it has been told to remain silent. Easy was about to take all the blame upon itself. Ninheimer's motivation was not simply hatred of robots but an effort to keep creative scholarship from being taken over by robots.

  The remainder of the robot stories are scattered throughout seven different collections of short stories. All were written and published after 1956. Two of them, in which robots play a less central role than in any of the previous stories, were reprinted in Asimov's collection of stories Earth Is Room Enough in 1957.

  "Jokester," Infinity, December 1956, deals with Multivac, Asimov's all-purpose computer (named, by analogy, after the early computer called Univac). Grand Masters, the only persons capable of comprehending the functions of the giant computer and of asking the meaningful questions, the scarcity of which had created a bottleneck in dealing with Multivac, are permitted great latitude. One of them, Meyerhoff, who has a reputation as a jokester, begins telling jokes to Multivac in an effort to discover who originates such jokes. Multivac ultimately reveals that jokes are placed in selected human minds by extraterrestrials who use them to study human psychology. Once the origin of jokes is known, the method will become useless as an objective technique. Humanity loses its sense of humor; there will be no more jokes, no more laughter.

  "Someday," Infinity, August 1956, tells the story of a couple of children who pull out of storage a robot storyteller called Bard and try to get it to tell more modern stories. It ends up kicked, abused, and deserted, telling itself a story about a poor little storytelling robot named Bard who will be appreciated someday.

  Here, as elsewhere, was a playfulness in Asimov, an occasional lack of seriousness that resulted in stories tossed off for a single effect. Some critics might consider this grounds for disqualifying Asimov from literary consideration, but Asimov did not consider himself a literary man. He was a writer, and he wrote anything that appealed to him. Som
e stories are inconsequential, but many Asimov stories ask the reader to take them seriously. The playfulness should be assessed at its own level, like Asimov's limericks and love of puns.

  Two more robot stories appear in Nine Tomorrows, an Asimov collection published in 1959. They, too, deal with Multivac.

  "All the Troubles of the World," Super-Science Fiction, April 1958, describes a world fifty years after the creation of Multivac, when it tries to destroy itself because it has been loaded with all of humanity's troubles and it "wants to die."

  "The Last Question," Science Fiction Quarterly, November 1956, has been called, by Asimov himself, "the best science fiction short story ever written." It has also been the basis for several planetarium shows. It begins on May 21, 2061, when two technicians ask Multivac if entropy can be reversed. As humanity spreads outward through the galaxy and then the universe, people ask the same question of increasingly more complex computers and always get the same response: "Insufficient data for meaningful answer." The universe winds down into the heat death called entropy, and humanity fuses its mind with Cosmic AC, which exists in hyperspace. Finally, AC learns how to reverse entropy and says, "`Let there be light.' And there was light."

  "The Feeling of Power," If, February 1958, also reprinted in Nine Tomorrows, is not technically a robot story, or even a computer story, but Asimov included it in Robot Visions because, he said, it dealt with pocket computers (which might more properly be called calculators). It was also one of his most frequently reprinted stories, because it dealt with a phenomenon more common some ten to fifteen years after the story was published: the inability of people to do simple arithmetic. In the story a world that has become so accustomed to electronic manipulation of numbers is astonished at the "magic" of arithmetic that has been independently discovered.

  Three robot stories are contained in Asimov's Nightfall and Other Stories published in 1969.

  "Insert Knob A in Hole B," Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1957, is a minor short-short about two spacemen on a space station who cannot get equipment to work properly because it is all shipped unassembled with inadequate instructions. Finally, they are shipped a robot programmed to put everything together. But it arrives unassembled.

  "The Machine That Won the War," Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1961, is another Multivac story. Multivac has been given credit for winning the war with aliens from the star Deneb. But in the last few months of the war, the man who was feeding Multivac the data began to fudge it because the data was unreliable, the man who was reading the results began to fudge them because he knew Multivac was unreliable, and the man who had to make the decisions relied on flipping a coin.

  "Segregationist," Abbottempo, Book 4, 1967, describes a world in which humans are getting metal replacement parts that make them increasingly like robots, and robots are getting fibroid replacement parts that make them increasingly like humans. The surgeon is old-fashioned and prefers to be all one thing robot.

  The Best of Isaac Asimov, published in 1973, contains, in addition to a reprint of "The Last Question," a robot story involving Elijah ("Lije") Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw, the principal characters in Asimov's two robot detective novels, The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. "Mirror Image," Analog, May 1972, presents a problem in which two robots confirm identically opposite stories of their masters, each of whom claims to have discovered an important mathematical technique and to have confided it to the other. Olivaw brings the problem to Baley. Baley questions the robots and comes up, finally, with an asymmetrical response that he interprets as proving the older mathematician's robot is lying. At the end, Baley reveals that the response could have meant just the opposite, but he already had decided that the older mathematician would never have confided in a younger man.

  Five additional stories are included in The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories, an Asimov collection published in 1976.

  "Feminine Intuition," Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1969, introduced a feminine robot for the first time (other than the throwaway MA series in "First Law"). JN-5 ("Jane") is developed to be intuitive and to produce useful guesses about which suns are likely to have habitable planets. But she is destroyed in an airplane accident along with her creator. Apparently, however, she had come up with the names of three stars within eighty light-years that probably have habitable planets. Though someone may have heard her reveal the names, a search turns up no one. Finally, the eighty-year-old Susan Calvin is recalled from retirement and from the evidence comes up with the answer: Jane had spoken before she boarded the plane and was overheard by a truck driver, someone nobody would have thought of.

  "That Thou Art Mindful of Him" was commissioned by Ed Ferman and Barry Malzberg for an anthology entitled Final Stage, published in 1974, which was intended to contain the ultimate stories on a variety of themes. Asimov's, of course, was on robots. The story also was published in Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1974. It returns to the Second Law: how can a robot judge whether or not to obey an order, i.e., what is a human being? In space the question is not as important, since most humans in space are responsible. But if robots are to be introduced on Earth, a diverse group of uninformed humans will be able to give them orders, and robots must be able to discriminate. JG ("George") models are created to make that judgment; they will begin by obeying all orders and then learn discrimination. George Ten persuades his creator to allow him to discuss the matter with George Nine. They come up with one solution to the introduction of robots on Earth: USR can make simple robots such as robot birds, bugs, and worms, that can handle ecological problems, and do not need the Three Laws because they are limited to simple actions. These robots will begin the process of accustoming humanity to robots. Meanwhile, George Ten and Nine come to the conclusion that only they are human. Eventually, they will take over. It seems the Frankenstein complex has proved not so illogical after all. With "That Thou Art Mindful of Him," Asimov appeared to have written himself out of the positronic robot series. But he was above such petty inconsistencies.

  "The Life and Times of Multivac," New York Times Magazine, January 5, 1975, returned to the theme of the omniscient, omnipotent computer. In "The Evitable Conflict," the Machines had taken over control of everything because they knew what was good for humanity, but they kept their omniscience and omnipotence to themselves. In "That Thou Art Mindful of Him," the Machines, it was revealed, had phased themselves out, perhaps unwisely(!), after they perceived their job was done. In the present story, a few people have begun to perceive a similar takeover by Multivac as slavery. Ronald Bakst gains the confidence of Multivac and supplies it with a problem in his field of mathematical games that he says could lead to human genetic changes that would create a humanity more likely to accept Multivac's direction. Bakst is viewed as a traitor to humanity but uses Multivac's distraction to uncouple a joint at a key spot and burn out the computer. At the end, as the other rebels stare at him, Bakst asks uncertainly, "Isn't that what you want?" Such ambiguity is unusual in Asimov.

  "The Tercentenary Incident," Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, August 1976, offered a new look at the question of the robot as political leader. At a Fourth of July celebration around the Washington Monument in 2076, the President of the United States, which now is a part of a planetary Federation, is disintegrated. But he then appears upon the platform to announce that what had happened had been the breakdown of a robot made to serve certain presidential functions. President Winkler becomes a great President. But a Secret Service agent named Edwards, who had seen the incident, believes that the real President had been disintegrated by a new and secret weapon and replaced by a robot. Edwards tries to convince the President's personal secretary of this truth, and urges him to observe the President closely and, if he discovers sufficient evidence, to persuade him to resign. But the secretary turns out to have been part of the scheme from the beginning and now must do away with Edwards. Asimov noted in an afterword that this story was a return to the theme developed in "Evidence" thi
rty years previously and suggested that he had come up with a better story and perhaps a better answer to the question of robots and political power.

  "The Bicentennial Man," Stellar Science Fiction, No. 2, February 1976, provides a kind of counterpart to "Robbie." Like Robbie, NDR ("Andrew") is a loyal and loving servant. He loves and serves the Martins. Unlike Robbie, Andrew not only can talk but, by some strange combination of brain pathways, can also create art and learn. The Martin family benefits by selling his art but also deposits half the income in a bank for Andrew's benefit and sees that he is provided every robot improvement. Finally, Andrew asks to buy his freedom, begins to wear clothes, writes a history of robots, obtains legal rights for robots, has his brain put in an organic body, and becomes a robobiologist. While USR develops ways of making robots with more precise positronic pathways (to avoid a repetition of Andrew) and then of making robots controlled by a central brain (as in "With Folded Hands"), Andrew develops a system for gaining energy for his new body from the combustion of hydrocarbons. He also learns to reason that what seems like cruelty might, in the long run, be kindness. When asked where all this is leading, Andrew says, ''My body is a canvas on which I intend to draw" A roboticist completes the sentence: "A man?" For his accomplishments Andrew is honored as the Sesquicentennial Robot on the 150th anniversary of his construction. He then wants to be declared a man by the World Legislature. After twenty-six years of defeat, Andrew recognizes that human antipathy toward him is rooted in his immortality, and he arranges for the potential to be drained slowly from his brain so that he will die within a year. On his 200th anniversary, the World President signs the act and declares the dying Andrew "a Bicentennial Man." Andrew's last thoughts are of the child to which he was nursemaid.