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creatures. There were other robot predecessors: Talos, the bull-headed man made of bronze, who guarded Crete for King Minos; a Golem molded of clay by various medieval rabbis3 and animated by a "shem" or name of God; Roger Bacon's talking brazen head; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's monster (1818); and Karel Capek's robots in his 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which introduced the Czech word for forced worker or slave, "robot," into the language. But every robot up to Asimov's time, virtually without exception, turned against its creator, and it was this tradition against which Asimov was rebelling. |
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The trend had begun to turn, however, even before Asimov's first robot story. Lester del Rey's "Helen O'Loy," published in Astounding in December 1938, described a robot created as so much like a person that she falls in love and eventually makes an ideal wife for her creator. Binder's robot, Adam Link, was a noble creature moved by a strong sense of honor and love. His brain was constructed of "iridium sponge," those of Asimov's robots, "a spongy globe of platinumiridium." And Binder's Adam Link stories a total of ten of them continued to appear in Amazing throughout 1939, 1940, 1941, and 1942 (seven of them were collected in Adam Link Robot, published by Paperback Library in 1965). In "Adam Link's Vengeance," published in February 1940, the robot thinks, ''A robot must never kill a human of his own free will." |
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No doubt there are other robot predecessors and even other stories in which resemblances to I, Robot are clear. The purpose in citing them, however, is not to detract from Asimov's accomplishments but to point out debts that he himself was quick to acknowledge (though he might not have realized the full extent of them; a magnificent memory may not always be an asset, and Asimov occasionally discovered, to his horror in the case of "Green Patches," that he was reworking someone else's idea). When Asimov showed "Robbie" to his friend and fellow Futurian, Frederik Pohl, the 20-year-old Pohl, already working as a part-time agent and full-time editor and writer, told him (correctly) that Campbell would reject it because it was too reminiscent of "Helen O'Loy." Amazing rejected it as well because it was too similar to "I, Robot," |
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3. In 1970 Professor Marvin Minksy (in "The Bicentennial Man" there is a robopsychologist named Merton Mansky) of the M.I.T. project on artificial intelligence spoke at the SFWA Nebula Award banquet about his work and the help that writers such as Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke had provided in laying out the chain of development from the Golem to the provision of teleological goals. Asimov got up and responded that the thought that had been running through his mind was, "What kind of goals would a Golem have if a Golem could have goals?" |
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