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the 1940s under the influence of the new editor at Astounding, John W. Campbell. The fiction began to reflect science as it was practiced then and might be practiced in the future, and scientists as they really were or might become. |
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In the introduction to The Rest of the Robots Asimov wrote: |
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. . . one of the stock plots of science fiction was that of the invention of a robot usually pictured as a creature of metal without soul or emotion. Under the influence of the well-known deeds and ultimate fate of Frankenstein and Rossum, there seemed only one change to be rung on this plot. Robots were created and destroyed their creator; robots were created and destroyed their creator: robots were created and destroyed their creator |
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In the 1930s I became a science-fiction reader and I quickly grew tired of this dull hundred-times-told tale. As a person interested in science, I resented the purely Faustian interpretation of science. |
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Asimov went on to point out that nothing is made without taking into account the dangers involved: knives have hilts, stairs have banisters, electrical wiring has insulation, pressure cookers have safety valves. "Sometimes the safety achieved is insufficient because of limitations imposed by the nature of the universe or the nature of the human mind. However, the effort is there." If a robot is considered as another artifact, Asimov reasoned, engineers would have built in safeguards. And so he began to write robot stories but of a new variety. "My robots were machines designed by engineers, not pseudo-men created by blasphemers. My robots reacted along rational lines that existed in their `brains' from the moment of construction." |
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Asimov's robot stories represent one of the longer continuous considerations of that phenomenon, or perhaps of any fictional phenomenon: it stretched from the writing of "Robbie" in 1939 to the publication of "Robot Dreams" in 1986 and "Robot Visions" in 1990. That span allowed Asimov to think about robots in many different ways and the scholar to study how Asimov's attitudes and ideas changed, but the manner in which the stories were written also inhibits the scholar from judging, except in the most general sense, the stories as a unified whole. They were created individually and they must be considered individually. Each builds upon earlier stories and all share certain assumptions, but all but a few were written without thought for their places in any overall scheme. In fact, the best way to think about them may be as variations upon a theme. |
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The beginning, and the book basic to the entire series of stories, was |
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