by James Gunn
"The Bicentennial Man" was a fitting conclusion to the robot saga. At last Asimov had arrived at the essential question: What is the difference between robots and humans? He first asked the question in "Evidence." He brought up and dismissed external evidence; even actions might only demonstrate that Byerley is an extremely good man. In "Victory Unintentional," the robots are believed by the Jovians to be humans and a superior race because the robots never say they are not. In "Let's Get Together," the question of distinguishing humanoids from humans is short-circuited by induction. In "Risk," the reader learns that the difference between robots and humans is that humans can be given general orders; in "Lenny," that humans, and only unusual kinds of robots, can learn. "That Thou Art Mindful of Him" speculates that, given the opportunity to make a judgment, robots will decide on the basis of their superiority that only they are human. "The Tercentenary Incident" distinguishes robot from human only by superior performance.
In "The Bicentennial Man," Asimov follows the question to its final answer. Andrew's first human attribute is his artistic ability, but this is not enough, nor is his bank account. The distinguishing characteristic seems to be freedom, but that is not enough. Andrew continues to explore the differences between humans and robots in an effort to discover the definitive answer: humans wear clothes and robots do not; humans have rights and robots do not; humans have biological bodies and robots have metal bodies; humans gain energy from the combustion of hydrocarbons, robots, from atomic energy; humans can discriminate between short-term cruelty and long-term kindness and robots cannot; humans die and robots are immortal. But perhaps the final distinction is Andrew's sentimental and hard-to-rationalize desire to be human when he is so clearly superior to humans in every way. The sentimentality that threatens the story is essential to the argument: robots are always rational and humans are not. Humans act for emotional reasons, and, ultimately, so does Andrew. Andrew, indeed, has become human.
Although "That Thou Art Mindful of Him" and "The Bicentennial Man" are fitting conclusions for Asimov's robot chronicles, Asimov wrote seven more robot stories.
"Franchise" (If, August 1955) extrapolates the exit-polling processes into the selection, by Multivac, of a single, typical voter whose choices act for everyone.
"Think!" (Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Spring 1977), describes an experiment to create a laser-encephalogram that accidentally results in telepathy. During the experimental demonstration, however, the computer starts communicating telepathically to create a new problem.
"True Love" (The American Way, February 1977) deals with an attempt by a man to find the perfect mate. During the process of analyzing first the available women in the world and then himself, the computer becomes more and more like the protagonist, and when the woman is at last identified, the computer arranges for the hero to be arrested for a malfeasance in office and plans to welcome the woman as his own true love.
"Too Bad!" (Microverse, November 1989) describes a process like nanotechnology, or the miniaturization of computers or robots to the size of cells or even molecules. In "Too Bad!," however, the robot is created to be miniaturized and used to seek out and destroy cancer cells in his creator. Sudden expansion, as in Asimov's novelization of Fantastic Universe, would kill the patient and the attending doctors and nurses. The process works perfectly but the recovering patient discovers that the robot destroyed itself, by miniaturizing itself to the size of an electron and jetting itself into space to blow up, rather than endanger the life of its creator, something the scientist finds "too bad!''
"Robot Dreams" was created for the anthology Robot Dreams (1986) and is the last Susan Calvin story. A young female computer expert uses fractal geometry to produce an added complexity in the brain of LVX-1 ("Elvex"), but calls upon Calvin when the robot begins to dream. Calvin asks Elvex to describe his dream of robots bowed down with toil; in his dream Elvex remembers only the Third Law, not the first two. All this reveals a previously unsuspected unconscious layer in the robot mind, not necessarily under the control of the Three Laws. When Elvex reveals that a man appears in his dream saying "Let my people go," and the man is himself, Calvin neutralizes his brain with an electron gun.
"Christmas Without Rodney" (Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, December, 1988) compares an old-fashioned robot preferred by a grandfather and his wife to the newer model preferred by his son and supercilious wife and nasty grandson. The grandson kicks his grandfather's robot in anger, injuring his foot, and tries to blame it on the robot. His mother wants it destroyed, but the grandfather defends the robot on the basis of the First Law (besides he saw the action himself). But as in "Think!," the story ends with the complication that the grandfather's robot expresses a wish that the Laws didn't exist, something it should be incapable of wishing. The grandfather can't decide whether to report the wish and have the robot destroyed.
"Robot Visions" apparently was written for Robot Visions (1990), like "Robot Dreams" for its anthology. It deals with Temporalists in 2030 sending a robot 200 years into the future. The robot reports back, almost instantaneously, that it has spent five years in a happy world that has solved all contemporary problems and has no record of any other time traveler arriving from its past. The Temporalists decide to leave well enough alone and experiment no more, but the narrator suspects that the happy future was populated by humaniform robots of which he, the narrator, is the first of that kind.
Asimov's last words about his robots may have been his introduction to Robot Visions. In it he listed the 16 robot stories that he considered particularly significant. They were "Robbie," "Reason," "Liar!," "Runaround,'' "Evidence," "Little Lost Robot," "The Evitable Conflict" all from I, Robot "Franchise," "The Last Question," "The Feeling of Power," "Feminine Intuition," "The Bicentennial Man," The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, and Robots and Empire. He also mentioned some of the other stories he was fond of but that broke no new ground, among them "Galley Slave," "Lenny," "Someday," "Christmas Without Rodney," "Think!," "Mirror Image," "Too Bad!," and "Segregationist."
Two stories in I, Robot were omitted from his final two robot collections: "Catch That Rabbit!" and "Escape"; but only two stories from the eight in The Rest of the Robots were included: "Lenny" and "Galley Slave." Clearly I, Robot still held first place in Asimov's affections, and even a couple of stories from that volume were considered dated or less worthy. Some of those omitted, but not all, were included in The Complete Robot published in 1982.
In the introduction to Robot Visions Asimov also admitted that he liked his robot stories better than his Foundation stories.
In the process of writing nearly 40 stories about robots over a period of fifty years, Asimov let various inconsistencies creep in. This is apparent not simply in the problem of chronology, which has various minor glitches, but in that of incompatibility: if some of the events took place, others could not. Some inconsistencies, such as those in "The Evitable Conflict," Asimov disposed of by declaring in a later story that the Machines phased themselves out when they thought their job was done (in "That Thou Art Mindful of Him"). Others he simply ignored, such as the fact that the Machines and the Multivac of "The Life and Times of Multivac" could not coexist, nor if Multivac was destroyed could it be "The Machine That Won the War" nor the computer that answered ''The Last Question." And if the robots take over some time after the end of "That Thou Art Mindful of Him," some of the subsequent stories would be not only redundant but impossible. In other cases, as in "Lenny," the invention of the teachable robot is made and then forgotten. "Segregationist" suggests the coexistence and even equality of humans and robots; robots are introduced and reintroduced on Earth, as in "Satisfaction Guaranteed," "Galley Slave," "That Thou Art Mindful of Him," and "The Bicentennial Man," as if none of the other attempts had ever led to anything.
Asimov was eclectic. He never set out to write a consistent future history of the robots, even though the publication and the surprising success of I, Robot, with its p
arts glued together made it seem as if he had. A certain number of common elements and cross-references has tended to reinforce the illusion. But it would be a mistake to judge the robot stories on this basis. I, Robot is the only self-sufficient and almost self-consistent work and should be adequate for the critic who desires unity.
The robot stories are a body of literature, much like the Scandinavian sagas or the Greek legends, that focuses on the question of how one should respond to the reality of the particular universe in which these groups of stories exist, from a cluster of viewpoints. The greatest value of the robot stories is not in internal consistency but in multiplicity of consideration. In these stories Asimov provided readers with the unique excitement of an inquiring and artistic mind returning again and again to a single question and discovering not only new variations but sometimes different answers.
4 The Short Stories
Asimov's two great literary inventions the Foundation galaxy with its future history and psychohistory, and the realistic, production-model robot should not obscure his creation of an even more substantial body of individual stories and novels that are not linked by common characters or common themes, even though most of them fit into the same future history as The Foundation Trilogy. In this chapter and in Chapter 6, I discuss Asimov's non-series stories and novels. That means a return to the beginning of his science-fiction career.
Asimov had been writing science fiction for three years and seeing his stories published for two when, on March 17, 1941, he entered the office of the editor of Astounding Science Fiction as he had done many times before. As usual he had an idea for a story to discuss with Campbell, but this time Campbell brushed it aside. Campbell had his own idea to present.
As Asimov recalled in his autobiography:
He had come across a quotation from an eight-chapter work by Ralph Waldo Emerson called Nature. In the first chapter, Emerson said: If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God. Campbell asked me to read it and said, "What do you think would happen, Asimov, if men were to see the stars for the first time in a thousand years?"
I thought, and drew a blank. I said, "I don't know."
Campbell said, "I think they would go mad. I want you to write a story about that."
After discussing the idea with Campbell and providing answers to such Campbell questions as "why should the stars be invisible at other times?," Asimov went home to write the story. He started it the next evening.
It was a critical time in Asimov's development as a writer, although he was not to recognize that fact until much later. Up to that time he had written thirty-one stories and sold seventeen. Of the ones he had sold, only three measured up to his own standards of passability the three positronic robot stories, "Robbie," "Reason," and "Liar!" and only one of these, ''Liar!," suggested Asimov's future greatness. "My status on that evening of March 18," he wrote in his autobiography, "was as nothing more than a steady and (perhaps) hopeful third-rater. What's more, that's all that I considered myself at that time."
Despite Asimov's initial concern, the story developed with unprecedented ease. By April 8 it was finished, 13,300 words entitled "Nightfall." It was published in Astounding for September 1941. The magazine's cover painting illustrated the climactic scene of the novelette. Over it were the words:
NIGHTFALL
by Isaac Asimov
Almost thirty years later, the story led the voting by the Science Fiction Writers of America for stories that had appeared before 1965 the year of the first Nebula Awards and the first Nebula Award volume honoring the best science fiction of the year to be published in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
After the publication of "Nightfall," Asimov recalled, "I was no longer a minor writer, hovering about the fringes of science-fiction fame. Finally, after three years of trying, I was accepted as a major figure in the field and I was still only twenty-one." To the detriment of his peace of mind but the benefit of his career, Asimov didn't realize that anything had changed. He kept struggling.
The story that marked such a turning point in Asimov's literary career is not exceptional in many ways (Asimov himself did not consider it either the best story of its pre-1965 period or even his own best story). The plot develops much more mechanically than in some of his better stories, even in some earlier ones such as "Liar!," the characters serve plot purposes and little else, and the language is functional. Why do readers, even fellow writers, rate it so high? The answer reflects the situation of science fiction in 1941. John W. Campbell, Jr., was consolidating his position of leadership in science fiction, and what was appearing in Astounding was becoming, for most science-fiction readers, the definition of science fiction.
The most important element of "Nightfall" was subject. It had a big one: the relationship of people to the universe. This was to become the most significant theme Campbellian science fiction would explore. It asked: What is humanity? How does humanity understand itself and its situation? What can humanity do about it?
The story's second element, the reversal of situation, was another Campbell favorite. On the planet where "Nightfall" takes place, the situation is almost the reverse of the situation on Earth. Lagash experiences eternal day rather than the alternation of day and night. How this affects people's behavior becomes the subject of "Nightfall."
The third element was a clear-cut test of scientific investigation as opposed to other routes to "knowledge." Emerson's poetic vision was just the starting place. "Nightfall" begins with the Emerson quotation as an epigraph. The answer to Campbell's question ''why should the stars be invisible at other times?" was Lagash, a planet that is part of a complex solar phenomenon that places three pairs of suns in the sky. Alpha, around which Lagash orbits, has a small red-dwarf companion named Beta. There are two more distant pairs. One pair is named Gamma and Delta: the other pair is not called by name (logically they would be Epsilon and Zeta, but the nomenclature is only figurative anyway). The result is that Lagash is virtually never in darkness, for one or more of the suns is always in the sky. But once every two thousand and forty-nine years, a large moon, neither seen nor suspected until just before the story begins, eclipses Beta when that sun alone is in the sky. The eclipse covers all of Lagash and lasts more than half a day.
This, improbable and unstable an astronomical configuration though it is, sets up Emerson's world of if. It is not an exact replica, perhaps because Asimov felt that a one-thousand-year cycle of savagery to civilization would be implausible, perhaps because the longer time span would be approximately the length of time between the height of the Roman Empire and the present, or between Athenian democracy and Newton. A more likely reason is that an exact parallel would seem contrived and the point of the story would be seen as a simple attack on Emersonian romanticism.
Four hundred years before the story opens, a scientist named Genovi 41 (the Lagashian Galileo) discovered that Lagash rotated around Alpha rather than vice versa. Since then, astronomers have recorded and analyzed the complex motions of the six suns. Twenty years before the story begins, the Law of Universal Gravitation was discovered (by the Lagashian Newton) and used to explain the orbital motions of the six suns. In the last decade, the motions of Lagash have been studied: the Law could not explain them, however, until a satellite of Lagash was postulated. Two months before the story begins, the scientists at Saro University calculated the orbit of the suspected satellite and came up with the prediction of Beta's eclipse. This had been matched with archeological evidence that nine or more previous civilizations on Lagash had reached levels comparable to the present one and then had been mysteriously destroyed by fire.