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It is the robots who display the "infinite variety" that Shakespeare praised in Cleopatra: Robbie with his more than doglike devotion; the drunken Speedy, caught between imperatives; the arrogant Cutie, blinded by the brilliance of his own logic; the puzzled Davie; the tender Herbie; the Machiavellian Nestor; the childlike Brain; the coolly competent Stephen Byerley; and, in a lesser way because they never appear directly, the omniscient Machines. They all have individualizing names (again, excluding the Machines); this strategy pays tribute to the human trait of naming vehicles and machines but adds to the humanization of the robots. They capture our interest more than the people as they should because it is they who exhibit the variations while the humans remain constant and predictable. I, Robot, though never in the first person, is always about robots, and the characters' reactions to the problems that the robots bring with them create the stories. |
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Asimov never identifies with his robots, however. He gives them self-awareness and human characteristics so that the characters (and the readers) can better deal with the problems they present. Readers read the robot stories incorrectly when they begin to care more about what happens to the robots than what happens to the people at least from Asimov's view. Asimov is a rational man, and rationally the robots are still machines: humans should no more become fixated on their endearing characteristics than they should fear their rebellion. All of this, including the lack of action and the conversational mode by which the stories proceed ("The Evitable Conflict" consists entirely of a conversation between Byerley and Susan Calvin), is less important than that each story exists as a puzzle to be solved. The delight of the reader is in the ingenuity with which Asimov's characters solve the puzzle. The robots exist to present the puzzle in their behavior; the characters exist to solve the puzzle. |
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This view of Asimov's fiction may explain much of his style. His dialogue, for instance, is a vehicle for describing and then analyzing the problem, and clarity is its most important attribute (robots may have problems understanding human statements, but other humans do not, unless information is deliberately withheld, as in "Risk," a story included in The Rest of the Robots). An emphasis on setting would imply a relevance of place to the outcome that would be misleading; a presentation of human variation would suggest that human differences are the main subject, instead of robot differences. In spite of the fact that "Liar!" and "Evidence" (the stories in which character plays a more important part) are clearly the most effective stories in the book, they |
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