Free Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition) by James Gunn Page B

published by Doubleday in 1964 as The Rest of the Robots, including three stories that were written early in Asimov's career but published in magazines other than Astounding, so Asimov did not think them suitable for inclusion in I, Robot. The remainder of the eight stories in The Rest of the Robots had been published after 1950. Asimov continued to return to the robots as new ideas occurred to him or editors requested new stories. His final two robot collections, collecting all of his robot stories and 16 of his essays about robots, were Robot Dreams, packaged for Ace Books in 1986 by Byron Preiss, and Robot Visions, packaged for Roc Books in 1990 by Byron Preiss.
    Asimov wrote nearly 40 robot stories, so many that they could not be reprinted in a single volume. Some were tossed off casually, but others added significantly to the intellectual and emotional consideration of the robot that Asimov began in 1939.
    Asimov's interest in robots and his readers' interest in Asimov's robots provide useful insights into how science fiction was changing in the 1940s under the influence of the new editor at Astounding, John W. Campbell. The fiction began to reflect science as it was practiced then and might be practiced in the future, and scientists as they really were or might become.
    In the introduction to The Rest of the Robots Asimov wrote:
    . . . one of the stock plots of science fiction was that of the invention of a robot usually pictured as a creature of metal without soul or emotion. Under the influence of the well-known deeds and ultimate fate of Frankenstein and Rossum, there seemed only one change to be rung on this plot. Robots were created and destroyed their creator; robots were created and destroyed their creator: robots were created and destroyed their creator
    In the 1930s I became a science-fiction reader and I quickly grew tired of this dull hundred-times-told tale. As a person interested in science, I resented the purely Faustian interpretation of science.
    Asimov went on to point out that nothing is made without taking into account the dangers involved: knives have hilts, stairs have banisters, electrical wiring has insulation, pressure cookers have safety valves. "Sometimes the safety achieved is insufficient because of limitations imposed by the nature of the universe or the nature of the human mind. However, the effort is there." If a robot is considered as another artifact, Asimov reasoned, engineers would have built in safeguards. And so he began to write robot stories but of a new variety. "My robots were machines designed by engineers, not pseudo-men created by blasphemers. My robots reacted along rational lines that existed in their `brains' from the moment of construction."
    Asimov's robot stories represent one of the longer continuous considerations of that phenomenon, or perhaps of any fictional phenomenon: it stretched from the writing of "Robbie" in 1939 to the publication of "Robot Dreams" in 1986 and "Robot Visions" in 1990. That span allowed Asimov to think about robots in many different ways and the scholar to study how Asimov's attitudes and ideas changed, but the manner in which the stories were written also inhibits the scholar from judging, except in the most general sense, the stories as a unified whole. They were created individually and they must be considered individually. Each builds upon earlier stories and all share certain assumptions, but all but a few were written without thought for their places in any overall scheme. In fact, the best way to think about them may be as variations upon a theme.
    The beginning, and the book basic to the entire series of stories, was I, Robot. The title represents an initial irony, since it is also the title of a story by Eando Binder (a pseudonym for Earl and Otto Binder, used after 1940 by Otto alone). The publication of Binder's story in Amazing, January 1939, and a chance meeting with Otto on May 7 of the same year at the Queens Science Fiction