The Robot Novels and Short Stories

It is worth noting that Asimov actually coined the term 'robotics', thinking he was using an existing term for a scientific field that at the time had no name.

Throughout his writing career, robots evolved from clunking mechanical devices that could 'robotically' be programmed with rudimentary communication skills and the ability to follow simple orders, to the galaxy-roaming Daneel Olivaw, indistinguishable in appearance from humans and covertly playing the role of humanity's unknown guardian angel.

Early Robots

Asimov's early robot stories deal, appropriately enough, with the early days of USRobots and the difficulties they encountered both in developing useful robots, and in gaining product acceptance of them once they were available. Many early stories dealt with human fear of robots, of human prejudice against them and the inevitable reaction to the displacement of low skilled workers by them. Asimov found his robots made worthy symbols for the human targets of bigotry in his own time.

The Robot Novels 1: The Caves of Steel

In The Caves of Steel (1954), a full-length science-fiction murder mystery, Asimov first introduces us to R. Daneel Olivaw. (The R. stands for robot, and in those days, was a required prefix on all robot names.) Earth is, at the time of the story, isolated from its own descendants, the colonists who left Earth to build their own worlds and better lives. The 'Spacers' are despised on a crowded Earth, and robots, which were adopted with alacrity on the labor-poor colony worlds, are only allowed on Earth in the farming and mining regions, and not in cities where they might interact with people.

The humans of Earth greatly resent the robots who take over their jobs, and there is a move afoot to legislate them off the planet altogether.

Into this volatile mix is tossed a murder, of a Spacer scientist who is trying to break Earth's isolation and distrust. The murdered man was a roboticist, and his creation, R. Daneel, is made entirely in his image. Thus, Daneel can, with Earth detective Elijah Bailey, go 'undercover' as a human to help solve the mystery.

The Robot Detective Again - The Naked Sun

The two team up again to solve a murder on a sparsely populated Spacer world, in The Naked Sun (1957).

These two novels together are a short course in sci-fi world-building. Not only does Asimov establish a future milieu, he painstakingly works out the human consequences of living within that milieu. The Earth of The Caves of Steel has been tamed and all mankind live in one of the great 'cities', huge domed constructs that make up the eponymous 'caves of steel'. After generations of living in apartments, traversing hallways and corridors, the people of Earth are uniformly agrophobic - if exposed to the sky, they panic and are forced to retreat back to the safety and comfort of their cave.

In The Naked Sun, the former Earth colony of Solaris is sparsely populated by humans, who, because of their extreme use of robotic labor, are very rich in material wealth. Scattered widely on the surface of their planet, they see the use of robots as a sign of status, and are made helpless at anything but ordering robots to tend to their every need. Because huge estates are also a sign of status, they can go for days without being in the physical presence of another human being. These feeds on itself until physical presence becomes 'icky', a dirty thing. In extreme cases, Solarians become phobic about other people, and do all their communicating via virtual presence.

Later Robots

Daneel and Bailey reappeared in novels published in the 'eighties, and Daneel alone crosses over to Asimov's Foundation universe, tying together the Foundation series and Robot stories and novels.

There have been several recent attempts to bring Asimov's robots to the big screen, notably in Robin Williams' Bicentennial Man, and Will Smith's I, Robot, but thus far, the definitive Asimovian robot movie remains elusive.