The Robot Stories

First published:I, Robot (1950), The Rest of the Robots (1964), and The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories (1976)

Type of work: Stories

Type of plot: Science fiction—artificial intelligence

Time of work: 1996-2064

Locale: The Earth and other planets in the solar system

The Plot

The bulk of Isaac Asimov’s short fiction about robots was written between 1940 and 1957. Nine stories are collected in I, Robot. Another eight, together with two robot novels—The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957)—appear in the collection The Rest of the Robots (1964). The eight stories, without the novels, also appear in Eight Stories from the Rest of the Robots (1966). Four more robot stories—“Feminine Intuition,” “That Thou Art Mindful of Him,” “The Life and Times of Multivac,” and “The Tercentenary Incident”—were published in The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories.

Although a few of the robot stories feature Donovan and Powell, two troubleshooters employed by U.S. Robots Corporation, the majority of the stories loosely follow the life and career of Dr. Susan Calvin. Calvin is a robopsychologist who is frequently called upon to deal with problems stemming from the increasing sophistication of the positronic brains of succeeding generations of robots. She appears only as an observer in Asimov’s first robot story, “Robbie,” which features a relatively primitive household robot.

Most of the stories in I, Robot revolve around the development of the Three Laws of Robotics, a built-in inviolable ethical hierarchy that compels the robots not to harm and to protect human beings, to follow reasonable orders, and to protect themselves from harm. The majority of the stories center on conflicts between two of the three laws that a new generation of robots has to resolve. Many of the conflicts result from increasingly sophisticated interpretations of the term “harm.” In some stories, such as “Little Lost Robot,” the focus is on the inability of the robots to deal adequately with a metaphor such as the command “Get lost!”

The early robots essentially conform to the stereotypical notion of a humanlike metallic construct. Later versions are nonhumanoid supercomputers called The Brain (“Escape”) and The Machines (“Evidence” and “The Evitable Conflict”). The final development is a generation of humanoid robots who can no longer be distinguished from humans and who are seen as benevolently running the affairs of humans at the end, making all human conflicts avoidable while making themselves indispensable.

The stories in The Rest of the Robots predate “The Evitable Conflict,” which is the last of the I, Robot stories to concern Susan Calvin’s career and the development of the positronic robots. The first two, “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray” (1940) and “Victory Unintentional” (1942), predate the invention of the Three Laws of Robotics. The other six deal with traditional robot models, not the complex machines that rule Earth in “The Evitable Conflict.” “Let’s Together” (1956) is a topical Cold War story in which “the other side” tries to smuggle humanoid robot saboteurs into the United States. “Satisfaction Guaranteed” (1951) has a woman fall in love with a humanoid robot, and “Galley Slave” (1957), Asimov’s own favorite Susan Calvin story, stands out among the author’s robot fiction for its unique ambivalence about the ultimate benefits of robot technology.

Bibliography

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