I apologize for the campaign-esque sound of the title. I’m still trying to get 2016 out of my head. Anyway, I said yesterday at Adventures Fantastic that I’m going to be reading more of the classics of the field. Furthermore I specifically named Asimov’s robot stories as one of the things I’ll be reading.
It’s Asimov’s 97th birthday today. He was born January 2, 1920, in Russia. I first read the robot stories in 7th grade. It’s been more than a decade (going on two decades now) since I last read one of them. I’ve read a few Asimov stories over the past year; I’m about a third of the way through The Winds of Change right now.
The robot stories have all been collected in The Complete Robot. I’ve got a copy around somewhere, if I an ever find the darn thing. I’m looking forward to diving into them. Robots used to be pretty ubiquitous in science fiction, but you don’t see them that much these days. They’ve been supplanted by AIs. Still, I like the old-fashioned robots, and Asimov did them better than anyone.
I’m all for old time robots.
Confession – I made a submission to ALL HAIL OUR ROBOT CONQUERORS! We shall see 🙂
Good luck. I was so swamped I passed on all three of those anthologies in that kickstarter. I just didn’t get a chance to develop anything enough that it was ready to start writing, much less submit.
Not to be too picky, but Asimov’s robots are AI’s. Most of the later ones could even pass the Turing Test. Of course, Asimov forgot to forecast a world wide web of interconnected robots, but nobody is perfect. 🙂
I agree, but for convenience I distinguish between an ambulatory AI in a single body (humanoid or otherwise) and one that’s confined to a network without a body or has multiple bodies at its disposal. That may be mental laziness on my part. Of course I’m old enough to remember when the term “AI” wasn’t widely used and much of what is called a robot these days wouldn’t have been considered a robot because it wasn’t an AI.
Asimov still did pretty well with the futures he envisioned. As you say, nobody is perfect. I do get annoyed when Murray Leinster isn’t given credit for predicting the wolrd wide web in “A Logic Named Joe”, in which he did envision something reasonably close to what we have now.
Murray Leinster had a lot of stf ‘firsts’, most of which have been forgotten. Surprising amount of his early work is still readable. I recommend him to the curious.
I like Leinster a lot. In fact I like his early stuff better than the later works. I read quite a bit of him about 17-18 years ago and was quite impressed by how well the writing held up. I should probably give him a reread.