This story reminds me
of nothing so much as some kind of cosy narrative about race
relations that you might encounter in pre-civil rights era America.
What Asimov appears to have done here is write a charming narrative
about a young girl called called Gloria Weston and her coloured
nursemaid, and then replaced with the nursemaid with a robot.
The plot goes like
this: Gloria’s mother disapproves of her spending all her time with
her robot playmate, the titular Robbie. She says: ‘I won’t have
my daughter entrusted to a machine. It has no soul and no one knows
what it may be thinking. A child just isn’t made to be guarded by a
thing of metal.’
George Weston protests that Gloria loves Robbie, and is in
no danger: ‘He’s the best darn robot money can buy and I’m
damned sure he set me back half a year’s income. He’s worth it,
though – darn sight cleverer than half my office staff.’ This
makes the relationship entirely clear. Robbie’s a chattel that
George Weston values in material terms: he’s a slave.
Well, Mrs Weston gets
her way and Gloria is heartbroken, but in the end coincidence –
perhaps with a bit of help from soft-hearted old George – sees them
reunited at the US Robots manufacturing plant. Robbie returns to his
servile status in the Weston household, just like the good little
robot that he is.
It’s all about
prejudice: Mrs Weston’s antipathy to Robbie is at first driven by
the people in village, who’ve banned robots from the village centre
after dark and who won't let their own children play with that strange Weston girl and her metal playmate. I’m sure it’s
supposed to be a story of tolerance: Robbie loves Gloria and can be
trusted to perform the menial task of childcare.
It’s an admission of the slave’s lowly status – in fact, the slave
loves it because the alternative isn’t freedom it’s a job in the
factory making other slaves.
There’s no other real driver to the story, no technical
SF challenge or even a mention of the laws of robotics. In fact, there’s
nothing here that requires a robot at all: the story works in exactly
the same way with slaves from any age, of any race. It’s as if
Asimov just thought ‘imagine if there were robots – would they
face prejudice?’ and plucked the first plot he could think of out
of the air. It is, unfortunately, a bit of a rum one by today’s
standards.
It’s a bit creaky and
old fashioned in other respects, as one might expect form a story
about the future written seventy years ago. It’s set, in fact in
1998 where the family visits the visivox every Saturday night and
drive a gyro but life still seems to follow the patterns of a
mid-century suburban ideal. The shrewish wife and
warm-hearted and indulgent dad are stereotypes from another era,
characters who are not just obsolete but not even fully realised.
Stereotypes aside,
though (and racism and sexism... only joking!) it moves along
quickly, sentences follow one from another in a pleasing way and
there are intriguing setting elements – the brief pen portrait of
future New York also feels like it’s drawn life and the factory of
U.S. Robots is interesting to see, as is Gloria’s encounter with
the experimental talking robot.
It’s not a great
start, it’s true, but we’ll wait and see how the next story
treats us.
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