One of the most consistently recurring motifs in SF has been the idea of artificial intelligence and thinking machines, and it was particularly prevalent in the decade and a half immediately after the Second World War. The classic 1940s' vision of the robot (although the stories were not published in book form until 1950, they had mostly appeared in SF magazines in the previous decade) is that of Isaac Asimov. Built around the famous Three Laws of Robotics, the stories collected in I, Robot did much to shape popular notions of what a robot might be and it is difficult to over-estimate their influence. Although the three laws were created by Asimov in close collaboration with Astounding editor John W. Campbell, it was Asimov who used them to most memorable effect. The nine stories in I, Robot, self-contained but tied together by the character of Susan Calvin, a robopsychologist working for the company which first manufactured the thinking machines, explore the consequences and implications of the laws when humans and robots interact. Through the stories Asimov not only builds up a gripping fictional history of the development of robotics from the late 20th century to the late 21st century but also sets out the logical and moral dilemmas that face both humans and robots as machine intelligence grows more powerful. In one story a robot on a space station, after logically deducing the existence of a deity, decides to serve God rather than man; in another a telepathic robot struggles to reconcile contradictory interpretations of the Laws and self-destructs when it finds it impossible to do so. Asimov's inventive stories, ranging in tone from darkly dystopian to humorous, examine questions about the dividing line between man and machine that have always intrigued SF writers.

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