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Baley refers to Daneel's "queer mixture of ability and submissiveness" at one point. At another, he thinks bitterly about the ambiguities of the First Law: "A robot must not hurt a human being, unless he can think of a way to prove it is for the human being's ultimate good after all." [This sarcastic remark re-emerges as the "Zeroth Law" in The Robots of Dawn and Foundation and Earth.] Asimov also has the opportunity to cast a backward glance at Campbell's 1934 story, "Twilight": "He [Baley] had known well enough . . . the qualities that marked off a man from a machine. Curiosity had to be one of them. A six-week-old kitten was curious, but how could there be a curious machine, be it ever so humanoid?'' |
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Asimov also rationalizes the humanoid shape for robots, which he did not do in I, Robot. Dr. Gerrigel points out that "the human form is the most successful generalized form in all nature." Therefore, rather than buying "a tractor with a positronic brain, a reaper, a harrow, a milker, an automobile, and so on," it makes more sense to buy "ordinary unbrained machinery with a single positronic robot to run them all" at "a fiftieth or a hundredth the expense." |
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Asimov supports his vision of the future with a sprinkling of technical details other than those that describe robots or the Cities or the express-ways. His Cities are powered by atomic energy (he uses the older term, "atomic pile") and were made possible by force shields, which lessened the threat of atomic war. Asimov foresaw the problem of the disposal of radioactive wastes and had the "so-called `hot ash' . . . forced by air pressure through leaden pipes to distant caverns ten miles out in the ocean and a half mile below the ocean floor." But "Baley sometimes wondered what would happen when the caverns were filled." The force shield also is present in the form of a force barrier that separates Spacetown from New York City. |
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There are other details: subetheric hand disruptors, somno vapor and retch gas (prophetic!) that help police control crowds, blasters (presumably different from subetheric hand disruptors), keratofiber (made out of some kind of horn?), one-way glass transparency at the flick of a switch, trimension that projects images in three dimensions, focused duo-beam for spying, hyposlivers of medication that dissolve into the body, shielded subether communications, no-stick fluorocarbon coatings on cookware, motospirals (a kind of escalator), natural solariums at the top of buildings so the rich can enjoy the sun when they wish, spray-on cosmetics, wire film (a kind of videotape) and a microfilm projector for projection in three dimensions with a film record in the form of a fixed atomic pattern in an aluminum block, and an alpha- |
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