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Circa 2007 The First Mercury Expedition. Robots try to help build the
mining station there, but the effort fails. |
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Teens and Twenties Gregory Powell and Michael Donovan handle most
of the difficult robotics cases. |
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| 2015 | "Runaround," Astounding, March 1942. The Second Mercury Expedition.
USR has developed a new type of robot, SPD-13 ("Speedy"). | 2015 1/2 | "Reason," Astounding, April 1941. USR has developed a new kind
of robot, QT-1 ("Cutie"), to direct energy beams from Sun to Earth
from solar stations. | 2016 | "Catch That Rabbit," Astounding, February 1944. USR has developed
a master robot, DV-5 ("Davie"), which controls six sub-robots, for
asteroid mining. | 2021 | "Liar!," Astounding, May 1941. USR creates a robot, RB-34 ("Herbie"),
which has the accidental ability to read minds. | 2029 | "Little Lost Robot," Astounding, March 1947. Work is progressing (in a station situated in the asteroid belt) on a hyperatomic drive for
interstellar travel. USR creates an experimental group of robots, NS-2
("Nestors"), some of which are not impressioned with the entire
First Law of Robotics so that they can work with scientists who are
involved in dangerous research. |  |
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2029 or 2030 "Escape" ("Paradoxical Escape"), Astounding, August 1945.
"The Brain," a larger positronic robot brain installed as a computer,
makes possible interstellar travel by suppressing its anxiety about
the temporary death of human passengers in the "hyperspace"
Jump. |
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| 2032 | "Evidence," Astounding, September 1946. Humanoid robots are possible and may have been constructed. | 2052 | "The Evitable Conflict," Astounding, June 1950. The world is unified
under a "World Coordinator," and the world's economy is entirely
under the control of giant computers called "The Machines." | 2064 | Susan Calvin dies. |
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Little more information than that sketched above is provided about the world in which I, Robot exists because little more is necessary for the understanding of the basic narrative. That narrative is about robots and the problems people have with them in spite of the precautions engineers have taken in constructing them. The most important precaution, and probably the single most important contribution to the success of the robot stories, is the Three Laws of Robotics.2 |
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Asimov was not the first to write about robots. As he pointed out in The Rest of the Robots, Homer, in The Iliad, described Hephaestus being served by maidens he had created from gold as mechanical, thinking |
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2. The word "robotics" was invented by Asimov although he didn't realize it at the time. He said that if he was to be remembered at all in future years it would be for the Three Laws of Robotics. |
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