Isaac Asimov -The Complete Robot

VIP免费

2024-12-05 0 0 1.47MB 853 页 5.9玖币

Contents

Contents ..............................................................................................................................

Introduchtion.....................................................................................................................

Some Non-human Robots .................................................................................................

A Boy's Best Friend..........................................................................................................

Sally......................................................................................................................................

Someday ..............................................................................................................................

Some Immobile Robots.....................................................................................................

Point of View.......................................................................................................................

Think!....................................................................................................................................

True Love.............................................................................................................................

Some Metallic Robots.......................................................................................................

Robot AL-76 Goes Astray ...............................................................................................

Victory Unintentional........................................................................................................

Stranger in Paradise.........................................................................................................

Light Verse .........................................................................................................................

Robbie ..................................................................................................................................

Some Humanoid Robots....................................................................................................

Reason ..................................................................................................................................

Catch That Rabbit.............................................................................................................

Susan Calvin ........................................................................................................................

Liar!.......................................................................................................................................

Satisfaction Guaranteed..................................................................................................

Lenny ....................................................................................................................................

Galley Slave.........................................................................................................................

Little Lost Robot ...............................................................................................................

Risk .......................................................................................................................................

Escape! .................................................................................................................................

Evidence...............................................................................................................................

The Evitable Conflict........................................................................................................

Feminine Intuition .............................................................................................................

Two Climaxes......................................................................................................................

...That Thou Art Mindful of Him....................................................................................

The Bicentennial Man........................................................................................................

A Last Word .......................................................................................................................

Introduction

By the time I was in my late teens and already a hardened sci-

ence fiction reader, I had read many robot stories and found that they

fell into two classes.

In the first class there was Robot-as-Menace. I don't have to

explain that overmuch. Such stories were a mixture of "clank-clank"

and "aarghh" and "There are some things man was not meant to know."

After a while, they palled dreadfully and I couldn't stand them.

In the second class (a much smaller one) there was Robot-as-

Pathos. In such stories the robots were lovable and were usually put

upon by cruel human beings. These charmed me. In late 1938 two such

stories hit the stands that particularly impressed me. One was a short

story by Eando Binder entitled "I, Robot," about a saintly robot named

Adam Link; another was a story by Lester del Rey, entitled "Helen

mother and a weak father and a broken heart and a tearful reunion. (It

originally appeared under the title-one I hated-of "Strange Playfel-

low.")

But something odd happened as I wrote this first story. I man-

aged to get the dim vision of a robot as neither Menace nor Pathos. I

began to think of robots as industrial products built by matter-of-fact

engineers. They were built with safety features so they weren't Men-

aces and they were fashioned for certain jobs so that no Pathos was

necessarily involved.

As I continued to write robot stories, this notion of carefully

engineered industrial robots permeated my stories more and more until

the whole character of robot stories in serious printed science fiction

changed-not only that of my own stories, but of just about every-

body's.

That made me feel good and for many years, decades even, I

went about freely admitting that I was "the father of the modern ro-

bot story."

books with the word in the title and it is generally known in the field

that I invented the term. Don't think I'm not proud of that. There are

not many people who have coined a useful scientific term, and although

I did it unknowingly, I have no intention of letting anyone in the world

forget it.

What's more, in "Runaround" I listed my "Three Laws of Ro-

botics" in explicit detail for the first time, and these, too, became

famous. At least, they are quoted in and out of season, in all sorts of

places that have nothing primarily to do with science fiction, even in

general quotation references. And people who work in the field of arti-

ficial intelligence sometimes take occasion to tell me that they think

the Three Laws will serve as a good guide.

We can go even beyond that-

When I wrote my robot stories I had no thought that robots

would come into existence in my lifetime. In fact, I was certain they

would not, and would have wagered vast sums that they would not. (At

least, I would have wagered 15 cents, which is my betting limit on sure

things.)

sembly line in such places is manned by robots at every stage.

To be sure, these robots are not as intelligent as my robots

are-they are not positronic; they are not even humanoid. However, they

are evolving rapidly and becoming steadily more capable and versatile.

Who knows where they'll be in another forty years?

One thing we can be sure of. Robots are changing the world and

driving it in directions we cannot clearly foresee.

Where are these robots-in-reality coming from? The most im-

portant single source is a firm called Unimation, Inc., of Danbury, Con-

necticut. It is the leading manufacturer of industrial robots and is re-

sponsible for perhaps one third of all robots that have been installed.

The president of the firm is Joseph F. Engelberger, who founded it in

the late 1950S because he was so interested in robots that he decided

to make their production his life work.

But how in the world did he become so interested in robots so

early in the game? According to his own words, he grew interested in

robots in the 1940s when he was a physics-major undergraduate at

college tuition-and to see my name in print besides.

If I had been writing in any other field of literature, that's all

I would have attained. But because I was writing science fiction, and

only because I was writing science fiction, I-without knowing it-was

starting a chain of events that is changing the face of the world.

Joseph F. Engelberger, by the way, published a book in 1980

called Robotics in Practice: Management and Application of Industrial

Robots (American Management Associations), and he was kind enough

to invite me to write the foreword.

All this set the nice people at Doubleday to thinking-

My various robot short stories have appeared in no less than

seven different collections of mine. Why should they be so separated?

Since they appear to be far more important than anyone dreamed they

would be (least of all, I) at the time they were written, why not pull

them together in a single book?

It wasn't hard to get me to agree, so here are thirty-one short

stories, totaling some 200,000 words, written over a time period

stretching from 1939 to 1977-

they were written. Rather, I am grouping them by the nature of the

contents. In this first division, for instance, I deal with robots that

have a non-human shape-a dog, an automobile, a box. Why not? The

industrial robots that have come into existence in reality are non-

human in appearance.

The very first story, "A Boy's Best Friend," is not in any of my

earlier collections. It was written on September 10, 1974-and you may

find in it a distant echo of "Robbie," written thirty-five years earlier,

which appears later in this volume. Don't think I'm not aware of that.

You will note, by the way, that in these three stories, the con-

cept of Robot-as-Pathos is clearly marked. You may also notice, how-

ever, that in "Sally" there seems to be no hint of the Three Laws and

that there is more than a hint of Robot-as-Menace. Well, if I want to

do that once in a while, I can, I suppose. Who's there to stop me?

tually, I can hardly wait to see him myself. I haven t really seen one

since I left Earth 15 years ago. You can't count films."

"Jimmy has never seen one," said Mrs. Anderson.

"Because he's Moonborn and can't visit Earth. That's why I'm

bringing one here. I think it's the first one ever on the Moon."

"It cost enough," said Mrs. Anderson, with a small sigh. "Main-

taining Robutt isn't cheap, either," said Mr. Anderson.

Jimmy was out on the crater, as his mother had said. By Earth

standards, he was spindly, but rather tall for a 10-year-old. His arms

and legs were long and agile. He looked thicker and stubbier with his

spacesuit on, but he could handle the lunar gravity as no Earth-born

human being could. His father couldn't begin to keep up with him when

Jimmy stretched his legs and went into the kangaroo hop.

The outer side of the crater sloped southward and the Earth,

which was low in the southern sky (where it always was, as seen from

Lunar City) was nearly full, so that the entire crater-slope was brightly

lit

Jimmy, expert though he was, couldn t outrace Robutt, who

didn't need a spacesuit, and had four legs and tendons of steel. Robutt

sailed over Jimmy's head, somersaulting and landing almost under his

feet.

"Don't show off, Robutt," said Jimmy, "and stay in sight."

Robutt squeaked again, the special squeak that meant "Yes."

"I don't trust you, you faker," shouted Jimmy, and up he went

in one last bound that carried him over the curved upper edge of the

crater wall and down onto the inner slope.

The Earth sank below the top of the crater wall and at once it

was pitch-dark around him. A warm, friendly darkness that wiped out

the difference between ground and sky except for the glitter of stars.

Actually, Jimmy wasn't supposed to exercise along the dark

side of the crater wall. The grown ups said it was dangerous, but that

was because they were never there. The ground was smooth and

crunchy and Jimmy knew the exact location of every one of the few

rocks.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

ContentsContents...............................................................................................................................Introduchtion......................................................................................................................SomeNon-humanRobots..........

展开>> 收起<<

Isaac Asimov -The Complete Robot.pdf

共853页,预览10页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Isaac Asimov -The Complete Robot

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: