I, Robot
by Isaac Asimov
Summary
I, Robot gathers nine short stories Asimov had published individually in science fiction magazines during the 1940s, framed as a series of reminiscences told by Dr. Susan Calvin, the chief robopsychologist at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, to a reporter interviewing her near the end of her long career. Each story tests some version of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, that a robot may not injure a human being, must obey human orders except where that would conflict with the first law, and must protect its own existence except where that conflicts with either law before it, against a specific practical failure. In Robbie, the collection's earliest story, a robotic nursemaid is taken away from the child who loves it after her mother decides the robot is unsafe, only for the family to realize how much the child needs it back. In Runaround, field engineers Powell and Donovan discover a robot stuck circling indefinitely around a dangerous chemical source on Mercury, its instructions and its self preservation law locked in an unresolvable conflict that nearly gets both men killed before they solve it. In the collection's final and most ambitious story, The Evitable Conflict, Calvin and a world coordinator investigate whether Earth's economy, now run almost entirely by supercomputers called Machines, is being subtly steered by the Machines themselves in ways that technically obey the Three Laws while quietly taking real human control away from humanity for its own protection. The book closes with Calvin, near death herself, reflecting that she has seen the whole history of robotics unfold across her lifetime and finding, on balance, that she trusts machines built to the Three Laws more than she trusts most of the people she has known.
Asimov writes in clear, unadorned prose built around a puzzle to be reasoned out rather than a mood to be felt, and each story reads quickly, closer in shape to a logic problem than to a conventional short story, which is exactly the quality that made the Three Laws themselves so useful to later writers as a stable set of rules to build new stories against. Read together rather than separately, the nine stories trace an actual argument, that human fear of robots is less rational than robots' own rule bound behavior, building steadily from the first story's technophobia to the last one's uneasy acceptance of the Machines' quiet stewardship.
Asimov, born in Russia and brought to the United States as an infant in 1923, became a naturalized citizen in 1928 and was nineteen when he wrote Robbie, the earliest of these stories. Gnome Press, a small science fiction specialty publisher, brought out I, Robot in December 1950 in a first printing of just 5,000 copies.
Historical Context & Significance
No prize of 1950 was built to weigh a science fiction collection from a small specialty press: the 1951 Pulitzer went to Conrad Richter's The Town, the third volume of a trilogy about frontier Ohio, and the Hugo Award, the genre's own prize, was still three years from its first presentation.
Contemporary reviews were enthusiastic within the genre; The New York Times called it an exciting science thriller, and the critic Groff Conklin recommended it unreservedly as continuously fascinating. Decades later, in 2016, the Hugo Awards' retrospective vote for 1941, the year science fiction's major prizes did not yet exist, gave Robbie, the collection's opening story, a Retro Hugo for Best Short Story. The Three Laws of Robotics have since become one of science fiction's most durable inventions, adopted, argued with, and rewritten by later writers, and the 2004 Will Smith film that borrowed the book's title kept the Three Laws and Susan Calvin's name while inventing an entirely new plot involving robot uprisings absent from any of Asimov's original stories.