Naturally, as I said before, much is dated, particularly in dialogue that reads a little stiffly to modern tastes. Throughout, Asimov's quick wit walks hand-in-hand with hard science to deliver stories that are truly speculative fiction with a wry twist. (Bits of this story were later lampooned by Poul Anderson in the short story 'The Critique of Impure Reason.') Unfortunately, in its interpretation of the don't-harm-humans law, it proceeds to feed people any line of bullshit they want to hear (regarding their careers, love lives, etc.), on the basis that the truth would hurt too much.

Other strange crises emerge: in 'Liar!', Susan Calvin encounters a robot that by some fluke is able to read minds. One robot refuses to believe it was built by 'inferior' humans, and develops a religious mania, worshipping the station itself and claiming to be the station's 'prophet.'Īnother robot on the surface of Mercury finds itself facing a conflict between laws, and ends up malfunctioning so that it seems literally drunk. Greg Powell and Mike Donovan are a couple of grease-monkeys employed by US Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., (I wonder if Bill Gates would have a stake in such a firm?) to field test the latest robots to come off the assembly line, and they run into strange problems indeed. Briefly, the laws prevent robots from harming people in any way require robots to obey people unless they are ordered to harm someone and oblige robots to protect their own existence unless they risk harming people by doing so. The Three Laws of Robotics are perhaps SF's most well-known creations, and in his earliest tales of the robots, Asimov focused primarily on those laws and the bizarre problems which might arise when the robots themselves interpret them differently than one might expect. The stories stand by the strength of Asimov's conviction. In Asimov's hands, steel and 'positronic brains' have a warmth and humanity that few authors today can successfully attach to their flesh and blood creations.

Machines with a heart of gold may very well be a cliché today. Though inescapably dated in many ways - 'Robbie' is set in a 1998 that we know has not come to pass - these stories hold an important place in the history of science fiction, not least for their establishment of the highly influential Three Laws of Robotics, but also for the groundbreaking way in which Asimov combined technological speculation with heartwarming, humanistic storytelling. Susan Calvin and her involvement with the history of the robots, the stories have been assembled in chronological order to form a novel in effect. With a framing device involving an interviewer who's researching the life of Dr. Not technically a novel, I, Robot in fact collects the earliest of Asimov's robot short stories and novellettes from the pages of (mostly) Astounding, spanning the entire decade of the 40's. Book cover art by Stephen Youll (left) Don Dixon (right).

I robot short stories