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I wanted to read I, Robot not because I
have seen the movie recently (the movie which respects
Asimov's conception of robots and is in accordance with the three Laws,
is not a story written by Asimov), but because I was interested in
the constraints that Asimov put to his "robotics". I wanted to know
how this famous three Laws would be put to the test, pushed to their
limits, or circumvented (for apparently they cannot be
transgressed...) The three Law of
robotics, as conceived by Asimov, are the following, and are supposed to
ensure the protection and supremacy of the human race over a species
that might well be superior in several respects:
First Law: A robot may not injure a human
being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law: A robot must obey orders given by
human beings except where such orders conflict with the First Law.
Third Law: A robot must protect its own
existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the
First and Second Law.
The stories follow a chorological order, and
each individual short story is independent but also part of a whole,
since it allows to pick up details giving us a better picture of
Asimov's world and its evolution, along with the evolution of the
robots themselves. The narrator interviews Susan Calvin, a
robopsychologist, on the interesting cases she came across during
her career...
The first story, Robbie, is set in the
late 1990's, and tells the story of an eight-year-old girl, Gloria,
whose best friend is her nursemaid robot, a type of robot who can't
speak. Runaround tells how two engineers, Donovan and Powell
(that we also find in other stories), on an exploratory
trip on Mercury (where they plan to send robots for mining), are
unable to go back because the robot supposed to fetch fuel is
not coming back to the ship...
In Reason, Powell and Donovan have been
assigned for a mission in a space station, where a new kind of robot
decides to take command and declares that because men are inferior
to him they cannot possibly have created him. He decides to obey a
"higher power" and proclaim himself its prophet... In Catch that Rabbit, the two engineers
supervise asteroid mining. When they watch, everything goes fine,
but when they don't, the robots don't complete the work. They have
to find out why...
In Liar!, a robot who presents a
strange ability must be examined by Susan Calvin: this robot can
read minds, and soon create havoc within US Robot staff ...
Little Lost Robot shows what happens when a Law has been
modified and a robot has been ordered to "lose itself". In
Escape!, a firm rival to US Robot has crashed its own
machine by feeding it a plan designed to build a space ship: could
it be that the data violates one of the Laws? When the firm asks for
US Robot's help, they decide to feed their own machine, The
Brain, with the information: The Brain builds the
spaceship effortlessly... In Evidence, a politician comes to
US Robots claiming that his political rival, Stephen Byerley, a
lawyer, is in fact a robot. Susan Calvin must investigate into the
matter...
I, Robot concludes with The Evitable
Conflict, where Stephen Byerley, now a World Coordinator, comes
to see Susan with worries that the machines seem to show slight
discrepancies in the result they produce, in some regions
threatening the fine balance between production and demand,
elsewhere causing small delays in large-scale projects, or
momentary unemployment. Byerley worries that such unbalances
might eventually lead to war...
As always with short stories, they are unequal
in quality, some like Liar! (my personal favorite), Reason
or Little Lost Robot and Escape! being very good,
whereas Catch that Rabbit is the weakest of the lot. The
Evitable Conflict, if a little long and different from the rest,
enables us to become familiar with the type of world in which robots
evolve. This is my first time reading Asimov, and my main worry (as
with most sci-fi more than ten years old) was that it would be
outdated, old-fashioned... Not at all! Asimov's robots have passed
the test of time and although I am not a sci-fi fan when it comes to
books, I will read more Asimov, at least more from the robots
stories...
Rating: 
© Discussing Books, 12/17/2004 |
Critiques