The Role Of Robots In Science Fiction Before Isaac Asimov

The Role of Robots in Science Fiction Before Isaac Asimov

In literature the most convincing subject is that of the artificial servant. In 1921 Karel Capek play’s "RUR," named his artificial servants "robots," from the Czech word robota, which roughly means as "unwilling worker or someone who does boring work." We continue to use the name robot even though there are other words lıke cyborg , android.

Isaac Asimov started to write his robot stories in the 1940s, and published the first volume, I, Robot, in 1950. The Three Laws of Robotics first appeared together in Asimov's story "Runaround," published in Astounding Science Fiction in March of 1942.

Later, the Three Laws became Important in the development of the plot in the robot stories, and as Asimov combined his robot stories with his Foundation stories and novels, the Three Laws played a major role there, as well. Nowadays science fiction writers and robot designers have gotten use to these three

Daneel Olivaw, the robot colleague of detective Lije Bailey in The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. When confronted with the severe power of human history and a couple of very hard decisions, he came up with the so-called Zeroth Law in Robots and Empire. This law allows a robot to harm a human if it is beneficial for humans. So Daneel can turn into a manipulator of human history, a sort of one-robot Illuminati. But Asimov was well aware of the dire implications of the Zeroth Law, and was still developing Daneel's story in the last robot/Foundation novels. Asimov ‘s wrote hundreds of short stories, including the social science fiction “Nightfall”, which in 1964 was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America the best short science fiction story of all time. Over the years, we couldn't meet with Asimov quite often. He refused to evaluate our project work as he felt that it might spoil the purity of his vision towards robotics which he was not interested