What makes these
stories such brilliant science fiction is not so much the speculative
elements, but the way the protagonists approach the problems in their
path. Each story establishes a limited setting to contain all the
elements of the plot. This ensures that the central problem is very
tightly focused, something inherent in the characters (usually the
robot) and the setting itself – Mercury, a space station orbiting
the sun, a mining station on an asteroid.
It also eliminates
‘call the cavalry’ solutions and allows Asimov to limit the tools
that Powell and Donovan (it’s them again) can bring to bear on the
problem. It mostly comes down to their powers of deduction and
rational approach and I think this is one of the big reasons these
stories appeal most to sci fi fans in their deepest pubescence.
Perhaps to the reader
in the 10 to 16 age group – when I first read this and many other
sci fi classics – the robots represent the incomprehensible social
rules of the world. Donovan and Powell are kind of like eccentric
uncles who lead the young reader’s thought processes through a
problem. They’re pleasingly rambunctious company with an
anti-authoritarian air – they smoke cigarettes and talk about beer,
they mock the ‘slide-rule boys’ who think a robot is all
theories, blueprints and lab tests and curse in a mild way that might
have been titillating in the 40s but sounds a little camp nowadays,
the gosh geewhiz nerd-talk of the classic geek: ‘You’re as lucid
as Euclid with everything except the facts.’
What Donovan and Powell
share with a child, though, is a tenacious rational approach to the
world. They want things to make sense and feel great frustrations
when they seem unfair or illogical. In fact they throw child-like
tantrums and shout at each other in frustration, although that might
just be Asimov egging up the conflict in an effort to make
Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum a little more interesting.
The problems of the
robots themselves all inevitably have a mechanical or electrical –
even positronic – origin. It’s finally patience and observation,
with a little inspiration that saves the day. Once deduced by Donovan
and Powell, the robot’s personality flaws can be fixed through a
simple adjustment to one of the circuits in the robot’s positronic
brain. This one actually hinges on a rather dubiously extended
analogy to climax with an annoying punch-line ending that makes you
groan. How we get there, though, is what makes all the difference to
this story.
It’s an interesting
to contrast the Donovan and Powell stories with another series of
robot stories I read at the same time in my life, Ro-Busters in2000AD. They’re pure Asimov: chatty robots with gimmicky names and
quirky personalities.
In Robusters, the
robots have the child’s-eye view of the world. They’re naïve and
hopeful, with the same longing for justice as children. The fascistic
human state is every mean decision Mum and Dad ever made and Ro-Jaws
and Hammerstein’s search for the utopian robot planet is a story of
gradual maturing as much as a slave narrative or a speculative
fiction exploring artificial intelligence. It’s not really the last
one at all, as a matter of fact.
This type of robot was
all over 2000AD (and Starlord!) and those early days. The robots in
Judge Dredd even had a robot revolution and if you think about the
plot of the first run of Robo-Hunter is basically Reason played out on
a planetary scale and with a layer of knowing noir wise-cracks.
There’s even a character called Cutie, although it was one of Sam
Slade’s robot sidekicks if I recall.
I’ve really enjoyed
the last three stories. Robbie was a worrying start but these have
been as good as I remember them. I was understood they were going to
be so far. The details are all so deftly laid out that it just reeks
of the future to me, perhaps because of my age!
These three stories
aren’t separated by the framing text. I guess we’re expected to
assume that Susan Calvin related them to the journalist (who later
confirmed the details with Greg Powell, now a grand-father living in
New York). At the end of this one, though, we get a short bit of the
framing text to introduce the first of the Susan Calvin stories.
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