|
|
|
|
|
|
3
Variations Upon a Robot |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Isaac Asimov's I, Robot has become one of the enduring titles in the canon of contemporary science fiction. Asimov's robot stories were the second of the two basic kinds of fiction with which he built his early reputation, the first being The Foundation Trilogy. Like the Trilogy, I, Robot, has seldom been out of print since its 1950 book publication by Gnome Press. It has sold several million copies in hardcover and paperback and has elicited persistent interest from filmmakers, most recently in the late 1970s and 1980s with a script by Harlan Ellison that suffered the usual Hollywood complications. Ellison's script was serialized in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in 1987 and published as a book in 1994. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Asimov did not stop writing robot stories after the publication of I, Robot, as he did with the Foundation stories after the publication of the Trilogy. Another group of stories was published by Doubleday in 1964 as The Rest of the Robots, including three stories that were written early in Asimov's career but published in magazines other than Astounding, so Asimov did not think them suitable for inclusion in I, Robot. The remainder of the eight stories in The Rest of the Robots had been published after 1950. Asimov continued to return to the robots as new ideas occurred to him or editors requested new stories. His final two robot collections, collecting all of his robot stories and 16 of his essays about robots, were Robot Dreams, packaged for Ace Books in 1986 by Byron Preiss, and Robot Visions, packaged for Roc Books in 1990 by Byron Preiss. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Asimov wrote nearly 40 robot stories, so many that they could not be reprinted in a single volume. Some were tossed off casually, but others added significantly to the intellectual and emotional consideration of the robot that Asimov began in 1939. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Asimov's interest in robots and his readers' interest in Asimov's robots provide useful insights into how science fiction was changing in |
|
|
|
|
|