I, Robot

I’m not sure why I’ve never really enjoyed the work of Isaac Asimov – or at least, his science fiction. (He also wrote mystery stories about the Black Widowers and their waiter, Henry, which I liked to read in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.) Foundation never really did it for me; even his short story, “Nightfall”, voted best science-fiction short story of all time, leaves me cold. I think it might be because his characters aren’t ones you can fall into: you can’t laugh with them or talk with them in your head or wonder what it would be like to be friends with them. They’re closed-off, somehow, and defined more by what they do and by what purpose they serve in the story than by who they are.

Rinkworks’s Book-A-Minute SF/F describes Asimov’s I, Robot as “a logic puzzle thinly disguised as a story”, which is more or less true. But what’s also true is that I LOVE logic puzzles.

Actually, I can’t help but admire the sheer thoroughness of Asimov’s logical permutations. The author of a writing reference book I once read (I think it was Teach Yourself Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction by Brian Stableford, but I could be completely wrong) remarked casually that once Asimov had thought up the three laws of robotics, he had the material for all the stories he could ever want to write. I remember thinking, O RLY? But YA. YA RLY. To steal phrasing from yet another better writer: age cannot wither them, nor custom stale their infinite variety.

Let me show you what I mean. Here are the three laws of robotics, as stated by Asimov and paraphrased by me:

1. No robot may harm or by its inaction cause harm to come to a human being.
2. A robot must obey the orders of a human being except where it would break rule #1.
3. A robot must do its utmost to prevent damaging itself except where it would break rule #1 or rule #2.

OK, so I’m looking at those, and I’m thinking, how the heck do you get even one puzzler out of them, let alone several anthologies of short stories and novellas? But that’s why Asimov is Asimov and I’m just a random blogger extolling Asimov’s Robot Stories. Why is a robot sent to fetch raw material for an important repair running in circles around the material and doing nothing? Why won’t a robot that can read minds tell its human masters what glitch in the manufacturing process gave it that power? How can you find a robot that was told to “get lost” when its only distinguishing feature is that it wasn’t programmed with half of the First Law? The answers to all these follow logically from the rules as stated above, but it’s still fascinating to see how Asimov resolves these conundrums.

What’s more, he does it expertly, in such a manner that the reader isn’t left staring in frustration at the sheer wall of plot in front of her, wondering if she’ll ever get to the top, but there’s no neon arrow above a sign reading “Escalator to the Solution”. Asimov never “cheats” by hiding things from his reader that his characters already know, and he doesn’t cop out by revealing an ultimately mundane solution.

In addition to the expert manipulation of logic, there are other fascinating aspects of the Robot Stories. Woven through I, Robot is a subtle commentary on humans’ reactions to new technologies, ranging from technophobia to treating the machine as a tool, reaching first the point where machines and humans can’t be distinguished and then the point where machines are humanity’s acknowledged superiors: from servants to guardians. I, Robot begins with “Robbie”, an interesting fable about a little girl whose fearful mother takes away the robot babysitter she loves and ends with “The Evitable Conflict”, where the super-powerful Machines are charting humanity’s course through the future.

And yet, there’s still that strange facelessness about Asimov’s characters that makes it difficult to sympathize with them. Dr. Susan Calvin, robopyschologist, makes the most appearances, but she hardly feels human; the part I found most difficult to swallow was in the mind-reading robot story, when we discover she has a desperate crush on one of her coworkers. Sorry, I don’t buy it. People don’t think about their emotions in the same clinical manner in which they discuss how to fix a broken machine or ponder the logical workings of robot minds. So you can tell me all you want about how Calvin is romantic or another coworker is greedily ambitious, but I’m not buying it until you can show me, not just in their actions in the particular scene in which that facet of their personalities becomes important, but through the entire story. I want to believe all along that they’re the sort of people who feel stuff like that.

The same goes for Asimov’s pair of field engineers, Powell and Donovan. One has a mustache and the other has red hair, and one is short-tempered and the other is calmer, and that’s about all I can tell you about them. I’m not even sure which is which, and, to be frank, I don’t really care. It’s difficult to imagine them separately, because the whole point of their characters is that they wind up in amusing (though sometimes dangerous) situations where robots run amok, and they have to think/banter their way out of them.

In a strange way, the robot characters feel far more human than the human characters. I can feel for Nestor/NS-2, the robot who’s yelled at by its human supervisors and in return does its best to hide from the other humans, even seeming to harbour what seems like anger toward the entire species for its unfair treatment. The Brain’s penchant for practical jokes and childlike nature resonates with me, and so does Cutie’s pigheaded faith. I wouldn’t do Asimov the crime of supposing this to be unintended: through the stories, it becomes quite clear that he’s suggesting these robots are more, not less, than human.

So I guess I wasn’t quite being fair when I said I agreed with Rinkworks’s assessment of I, Robot as a collection of logic puzzles. Logic puzzles do make you think, but they make you think about logic. Asimov’s stories also make you think about logic – if robot A is doing action X but the First Law of Robotics says A can’t do X unless Y… – but they make you think about people, too. In one of the later stories, Asimov has a character point out that robots would make the best leaders because not only do the three laws of robotics reflect the core principles held by every upstanding and “good” human being, but, unlike a human being, a robot is physically incapable of breaking them – and therefore immune to temptation*. While I don’t know that I agree with Asimov on everything, I do like the precise way in which he’s thought his plots through, both action-wise and theme-wise. The Rest of the Robots and The Complete Robot are definitely going on my list of library holds.

* This, BTW, is a little skeevy to me, because I don’t like the idea that the best way to be good is to be built in such a way that being “bad” isn’t an option. I’d like to think that the reason we value people who do good so highly is because we know they didn’t have to do good. See Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.