THE SCIENCE FICTION OF ISAAC ASIMOV
Isaac Asimov, were a scientific commentator, a major SF writer; and a card
carrying Humanist. His Three laws of robotics are very humanistic. Real life
robotics engineers have taken them up. The laws, which are crucial to any
understanding of his work, are ‘/. No robot can injure a human being, or
through inaction, cause human beings to come to any harm 2/. Robots must obey
orders given by human beings except where such orders conflict with the first
law. 3/. Robots must protect their own existence, unless this protective
behaviour conflicts with the first two laws. ' Some of Asimov's short stories
are very moving; in All The Troubles Of The World, a computer agony aunt called
Multivac manipulates a young boy into switching it off. It wants to die it
says. Its task of grasping human tragedy and despair provokes its own suicidal
depression. Asimov proved that stories about robots could be imaginative even
without having them killing scores of people. His robots have wisdom programmed
into them; we have to learn our humanity the hard way. We can't be programmed
to do that which is morally ethically right, we should envy Asimov's robots.
Asimov's ambitious Foundation novels (the first, Foundation, appearing in 1951)
present a whole future history, spanning thousands of years It takes up the
idea of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and applies then to a
future space federation, staving off gradual decline towards barbarism. His
work is full of wonderful assertions about crimes against humanity;
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" he said in
Foundation. Asimov often saw humanity as no more advanced in the
computer/robotics age than we were in prehistoric times. The Caves Of Steel
(1954) takes its title from the idea that futuristic city dwellings are just a
new kind of cave, and that we are every bit as savage as we imagine our
cave-dwelling Neanderthal forbears were. Here, a detective who despises robots
ends up with one as a co-worker. They have to work out how the three laws of
robotics seem to have been violated. It turns out to be a human behind it,
though in later stories, Asimov did give in to temptation and create killer
robots. In Fantastic Voyage (1966) Asimov tells of a journey into inner space
when a team of medics are shrunk and sent on a voyage through a human patient
in order to perform delicate microsurgery from within. A low budget but
not-unclever film version followed. Asimov not only wrote some of the best
imaginative SF, but also many excellent articles and books on science, culture,
art, religion, and psychology. Many pulp magazines included scientific articles
in between the SF stories. Einstein was a keen subscriber to many such
journals. Asimov wrote a staggering 329 non-fiction science essays for Fantasy
And Science Fiction magazine alone. Many readers of the science articles, and
even the fiction itself have gone on to take a career interest in science as a
result. Asimov was unusually cheerful, and often comical as an SF writer. Many
works seemed to undermine and upset our sense of value and meaning. The post
war years were a time of social uncertainty strongly reflected in SF. Invaders
from other worlds became pitiless and inhumane, like Lovecraft’s Cthulhu,
generally simply attacking Earth for the sake of it, or for no more reason than
that they could. Asimov rarely went down such a path, but still presented much
of the finest SF ever penned.
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