Caves of Steel - Isaac Asimov [1]
R.U.R. added its somber view to that of the even more famous Frankenstein, in which the creation of another kind of artificial human being also ended in disaster, though on a more limited scale. Following these examples, it became very common, in the 1920s and 1930s, to picture robots as dangerous devices that invariably destroyed their creators. The moral was pointed out over and over again that “there are some things Man was not meant to know.”
Even as a youngster, though, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance. To me, it always seemed that the solution had to be wisdom. You did not refuse to look at danger, rather you learned how to handle it safely.
After all, this has been the human challenge since a certain group of primates became human in the first place. Any technological advance can be dangerous. Fire was dangerous from the start, and so (even more so) was speech—and both are still dangerous to this day—but human beings would not be human without them.
At any rate, without quite knowing what dissatisfied me about the robot stories I read, I waited for something better, and I found it in the December 1938 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. That issue contained “Helen O’Loy” by Lester del Rey, a story in which a robot was portrayed sympathetically. It was, I believe, only his second story, but I was a del Rey fan forever after. (Please don’t anybody tell him this. He must never know.)
At almost the same time, in the January 1939 issue of Amazing Stories, Eando Binder portrayed a sympathetic robot in I, Robot. This was much the poorer story of the two, but again I vibrated. Dimly, I began to feel that I wanted to write a story in which a robot would be portrayed lovingly. And on May 10, 1939, I began such a story. The job took me two weeks, for in those days it took me quite a while to write a story.
I called it “Robbie,” and it was about a robot nursemaid, who was loved by the child it cared for and feared by the child’s mother. Fred Pohl (who was also nineteen at the time, and who has matched me year for year ever since) was wiser than I, however. When he read it, he said that John Campbell, the all-powerful editor of Astounding, would not take it because it was too much like “Helen O’Loy.” He was right. Campbell rejected it for that very reason.
However, Fred became editor of a pair of new magazines soon after, and he took “Robbie” on March 25, 1940. It appeared in the September 1940 issue of Super-Science Stories, though its name was changed to “Strange Playfellow.” (Fred had an awful habit of changing titles, almost always for the worse. The story has appeared many times since, but always under my own original title.)
I was, in those days, dissatisfied with any sale not made to Campbell, however, and so I tried another robot story after a while. I discussed the idea with Campbell first, though, to make sure he wouldn’t reject it for anything other than inadequate writing, and then I wrote “Reason,” in which a robot got religion, so to speak.
Campbell bought it on November 22, 1940, and it appeared in the April 1941 issue of his magazine. It was my third sale to him and the first one he had taken as it stood, without requesting revision. I was so elated by this that I quickly wrote a third robot story, about a mind-reading robot, which I called “Liar!”, and this one Campbell also took, and it appeared in the May 1941 issue. I had two robot stories in two successive issues.
After that, I did not intend to stop. I had a series going.
I had more than that. On December 23, 1940, when I was discussing my idea for a mind-reading robot with Campbell, we found ourselves discussing the rules that governed the way in which a robot behaved. It seemed to me that robots were engineering devices with built-in safeguards, and so the two of us began giving verbal form to those safeguards—these became the “Three Laws of Robotics.”
I first worked out the final form of the Three Laws, and used them explicitly, in my fourth robot story,