The I, Robot reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004
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I, Robot

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I, Robot is a collection of science fiction short stories by Isaac Asimov, first published in 1950. Although working well enough as standalone stories, they share a theme of the interaction of humans, robots and morality, and put together tell a larger story of Asimov's fictional history of robotics.

The narrator, and central character, is Dr. Susan Calvin, chief robopsychologist at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., the major manufacturer of robots. The stories are presented as her reminiscences of her past work, which chiefly are concerned with aberrant behaviour of robots, and the use of 'robopsychology' to sort them out. The book also contains the short story in which Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics first appear.

The title was applied earlier to a short story by Eando (Earl and Otto) Binder. Asimov originally titled his collection Mind and Iron, and initially objected when the publisher changed the title.

Series:
Followed by:
Robot Series
Foundation Series 		The Complete Robot

Table of contents
1 I, Robot
2 I, Robot on screen
3 External links
4 I, Robot: The Game
5 External links

I, Robot

To you, a robot is just a robot. But you haven't worked with them. You don't know them. They're a cleaner, better breed than we are.

When Earth is ruled by master-machines... when robots are more human than humankind.

Isaac Asimov's unforgettable, spine-chilling vision of the future - available at last in its first paperback edition.

-Cover blurb from the paperback edition of I, Robot, and largely inaccurate to boot. The first paragraph is a quotation of one of the book's characters, Dr Susan Calvin, but the rest reads rather like the copy of an editor who hadn't actually read the book. At the time of publication, robots were depicted in science fiction as either servile machines or evil creations that revolted in the manner of Frankenstein. Asimov himself said that in writing the Robot stories he sought to replace both views with something more rational.

Stories



ISBN numbers


I, Robot on screen

In the 1960s, two short stories from this collection were made into episodes of Out of the Unknown television series: "The Prophet" (1967), based on "Reason", and "Liar" (1969).

In the late 1970s, Harlan Ellison produced a screenplay based on Asimov's book. The film was never made, but the script appeared in book form under the title I, Robot:  The Illustrated Screenplay (1994). A 1977 Alan Parsons Project album was inspired by Asimov's I Robot and is named after it. A motion picture adaptation, I, Robot (movie), loosely based on Asimov's book starring Will Smith is currently under development by Twentieth Century Fox and is expected to be released in 2004.

The 1960s science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits had an episode called "I, Robot" (the 1990s revival of the series includes a remake of the episode, with the same title); it is based on the Eando Binder story, and has no connection to Asimov's book.


External links




I, Robot: The Game

I, Robot was an arcade game made by Atari and released in 1983. It was the first commercial video game with 3-D polygonal graphics and featured flat shading. It also had very innovative gameplay, featuring a "game" mode and an "ungame" mode where one draws with the objects in the game by leaving trails. The game has no relation to the book of the same name.




External links