Archive of posts with tag 'Isaac Asimov'

Spacers and Earthmen

September 18, 2017 • #

This is part three of a series on Isaac Asimov’s Greater Foundation story collection. This post is about the first installment of the Robot trilogy, The Caves of Steel.

We’re still early in the timeline of Asimov’s epic saga. The short stories in I, Robot set the stage for dozens of future novels that take place in the same universe and along the same timeline. The far-future stories of the famous Foundation series have threads leading all the way back to the “3 Laws” and the Robot series, which starts off the action on Earth. The Caves of Steel is the first Robot entry, introducing the recurring character of Lije Baley. With this one, we set the stage for humanity’s eventual galactic expansion.

While I, Robot and Asimov’s other robot story collections lean toward the cerebral and philosophical, The Caves of Steel is a murder mystery, buddy cop procedural.

The setting is New York City millennia from now, on an inhospitable and mostly ruined Earth where humans are collected in domed megacities. In between the dense urban complexes the landscape is barren and in ruin. The city’s inhabitants never go outside, living 100% of the time within the “caves of steel”. As a result, Baley suffers from debilitating agoraphobia. Just outside of New York is Spacetown, a colony of “spacers” — humans from the 50 or so nearby “spacer worlds” that had been colonized hundreds of years before that return to Earth for trading purposes. Spacers look down on the “earthmen” as dirty, diseased, and lesser people. And while people of Earth have banned robots from their cities, spacers embrace them and promote the spread of human-robot cooperation.

Baley’s set on a mission to investigate the murder of Roj Sarton, a spacer roboticist from the planet Aurora that turns up dead in the outpost of Spacetown. Baley serves as the classic gut-driven detective cop, paired on the case with a humanoid robot partner named R. Daneel Olivaw, the straight-laced logical one of the duo.

The earthmen have a general distrust of robots, fearing that they’ll take their jobs. Most robots are machine-like, purpose-built laborers or assistants, but R. Daneel is humanoid, a spitting image of his creator, whom we later find out is the murdered Dr. Sarton. Baley is initially unaware that Daneel is a robot, but is impressed by his incredible investigative abilities. Through their work together hunting for the culprit, Baley comes around on his opinion of robots, eventually agreeing with the spacers that humans and robots should cooperate to expand to other planets.

The setting is fascinating given the year it was published. The urban sprawl megalopolis has been the host of countless sci-fi works over the last 50 or 60 years. Not to say Asimov invented the concept, but his version must have been in the minds of the creators of Coruscant, The Sprawl, or Los Angeles 2019. To his credit, Asimov does do a decent job with the political elements of spacer vs. earthman, the “medievalist” Luddites vs. the pro-robot camp. The resolution to that conflict is what plants the seed of the Galactic Empire trilogy. Given that he published these in all sorts of mixed up order, it’s impressive how well they hold together as a chronological series¹.

Aside from being a passable mystery tale, Asimov forms something of a parable about the risks of unjustified prejudice and presumption. The medievalist hatred of spacer outsiders has for hundreds of years stifled the advancement of Earth livelihood. Human survival is dependent on moving forward rather than standing still, and the elimination of prejudice from both sides (Earth to Aurora and vice versa) is essential to each’s survival; the Spacers and Earthmen need each other. Without the spacer worlds the Earth is in a tailspin of destruction, and the spacers have created societies too uniform and isolated, with shallow gene pools that need an injection of diversity after shunning outsiders for thousands of years.

I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of storytelling. Asimov puts together a compelling “whodunit” that had me hooked until the final act when the crime’s details are uncovered.

A little hindsight here, given I’ve already read a couple of the Empire and Foundation novels. Look for Han Fastolfe. ↩

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The Three Laws of Robotics

March 7, 2014 • #

This is part two of a series on Isaac Asimov’s Greater Foundation story collection. This part is about the short story collection, I, Robot.

Picking up with the next entry in the Asimov read-through, I read a book I last picked up in college, I, Robot. This is the book that cemented his reputation in science fiction. His works on robots are probably his most well-known. He was an early thinker in the space (he even coined the term “robotics”), and wrote extensively on the subject of artificial intelligence. After reading this again, it’s incredible how much influence a 60 year old collection of pulpy science fiction thought experiments ended up having on the sci-fi genre, and arguably on real-world engineering technical development itself.

I, Robot isn’t a novel, but a collection of 9 short stories, each of which were published independently in several science fiction publications throughout the 1950s. The parts are stitched together within a framing story of Dr. Susan Calvin, the “robopsychologist” that makes appearances in several of Asimov’s robot stories, recounting her experiences with robot behavior working for US Robots and Mechanical Men, from the time of the earliest models to extremely advanced humanoid versions. Fundamentally, I, Robot is a philosophical study of Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics, laws that dictate the allowable behavior of robots and which form the basis of much of his exploratory thinking on the nature of intelligence:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

This simple set of rules form the basis for the stories of I, Robot. The groundwork of the Three Laws lets Asimov ruminate on logical, ethical thought process, and what differentiates the human from the artificial.

Each story is an analysis of an aspect of robotic technical development. As the stories progress and the technology advances, each plot line underscores elements of human thought taken for granted in their complexity and nuance. In order to poke and prod at the Three Laws, moral and psychological situations are presented to investigate how robots might respond to input, and by extension, how minor variations in inputs could dramatically change response. Asimov’s robots are equipped with “positronic brains“—three-pronged logic processors that weigh every decision against the Three Laws. Upon initial interpretation within the framework of the Laws, each plot’s situation appears to result in a conundrum or violation of the rule set. Asimov’s mystery storytelling then kicks in and invites the reader to deconstruct and solve the puzzle.

My favorite of the stories center around US Robots’ field engineers, Mike Powell and Greg Donovan. They appear in four of the nine stories, and serve as the corporate guinea pigs responsible for putting new robot models through their paces in a variety of settings, from remote space stations to inhospitable planets to asteroids. I loved how the technology always seems to get the better of them, only to have them figure clever solutions by twisting the Three Laws to their advantage. In “Reason”, Powell and Donovan are stuck on a space station with a robot named QT-1 (Cutie), a model with highly developed reasoning abilities. Cutie refuses to obey any of their commands because it reasons that a power exists higher than humans, which it calls “The Master”. They eventually discover that the Master is actually the station’s power source, which Cutie determines is of a higher authority than the stations human operators, as none of them could exist without it. It’s a 2001-esque series of events, though Cutie isn’t quite as insidous as HAL.

“Evidence” introduces the character of Stephen Byerley, a man suspected of being a highly-developed humanoid robot. Dr. Calvin attempts to use psychological analysis to determine if he is man or machine when physical means are exhausted, realizing that if he were truly a robot, he would be forced by programming to obey the Three Laws. But the investigation takes a turn when she realizes that his conformance with the Three Laws may “simply make him a good man”, since the Laws were engineered to model human morals.

In the final story, “The Evitable Conflict”, Asimov even hints at what our modern AIs will look like, with positronic brains embedded in even non-humanoid machines, a 1950s vision of Siri or Watson. These computers of the future are critical in managing the world’s economy, mass-production, and coordination. The computers begin experiencing minor glitches in decision-making that seem to be minor violations of the First Law. But it turns out that the computers have effectively invented a “Zeroth Law” by reinterpreting the First: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm—making minor exceptions to the First Law to save humanity from themselves. Between Calvin and Byerley, there’s a sense of despair as humanity has given its future over to the machines. Would we be okay dispensing with free will in order to avoid war and conflict? It punctuates the final evolutionary path of robotic development, and provides a nice segue into the Robot novels in the future chronology of his universe.

“Think, that for all time, all conflicts are finally evitable. Only the Machines, from now on, are inevitable!”

I’m interested to see where the path leads as I continue to read more of his work, and to find out how these robot stories interconnect with his wider universe. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It’s clever, thought-provoking, humorous, and will make you realize how many of our favorite works of science fiction in writing and film owe a tremendous debt to this book.

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Upwhen and Downwhen

October 30, 2013 • #

This is part one of a series of essays on Isaac Asimov’s famous Greater Foundation story collection. In this first one I discuss the time travel mystery The End of Eternity.

The prolific science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published an astonishing body of work in his life. Though he’s probably most well-known for his stories, collections, and postulations about robots (and, therefore, artificial intelligence), he wrote a baffling amount speculating on much bigger ideas like politics, religion, and philosophy. The Robot series is one angle on a bigger picture. Within the same loosely-connected universe sit two other series, those of the Empire and Foundation collections. Altogether, these span 14 full novels, with a sprinkling of several other short story collections in between.

In deciding to read all the works in the collection, I first had to choose where to begin. Is the best experience had by reading in the order he wrote them? Or to read them in story chronological order? Trying to figure this out, I naturally ran across the sci-fi message board discussions arguing the two sides, with compelling arguments both ways. I wasn’t sure which had more merit until I read that Asimov himself suggests a chronological approach, rather than in the order of their writing, to lend maximum immersion into the galactic saga. Taking a tip from another reader, I also decided to go a step further and begin with one outside of the main series, but seen by many as a precursor to the other storylines — the 1955 time travel story The End of Eternity.

The novel is primarily a mystery-slash-thriller, set in a distant future. The story follows the experiences of Andrew Harlan, a man extracted from Reality and into “Eternity”, a place that exists outside of time where humans called “Eternals” have taken it upon themselves to police the timeline of human existence, altering Reality where necessary to minimize human suffering, and control the flow of history. Eternals are people recruited from various times throughout history for particular desired skills, from the 27th century, all the way up to the 30,000th and beyond. Within Eternity is something of a class hierarchy, with Eternals dividing up the duties: Sociologists use statistics to plot the lives of individuals, Computers calculate the long-term effects of Reality Changes, and Technicians pinpoint the exact moments in time at which to intiate the Reality Change. By traveling time and entering at an exact pre-calculated point, Technicians strive to introduce the “minimum necessary change” to induce a “maximum desired response”. In other words, the smallest modification to Reality possible to create the most positive outcome:

“…He had tampered with a mechanism during a quick few minutes taken out of the 223rd and, as a result, a young man did not reach a lecture on mechanics he had meant to attend. He never went in for solar engineering, consequently, and a perfectly simple device was delayed in its development a crucial ten years. A war in the 224th, amazingly enough, was moved out of Reality as a result.”

Harlan is one of the Technicians, who actually triggers these butterfly effect Reality Changes. Unlike most of the Eternals, he has a fascination with the “primitive centuries”, those of the era before the discovery of time travel in the 24th. He collects artifacts from the 20th and 21st centuries — magazines, books, and other relics of the past to understand what made people tick in the time before Eternity. So Harlan and the other Eternals go about this business, traversing time “upwhen” and “downwhen” along their temporal transit system, shaping history like plastic.

This story contains one of my favorite takes on time travel. It presents a set of rules, obeys those rules, and directly acknowledges the time paradoxes it introduces. The plot itself is set up as a mystery, flinging Harlan into a Twilight Zone-esque narrative, leaving us as perplexed as he is as to what is actually going on, and whether he’s being manipulated by those around him. Eternals are allowed no contact or personal relationship with any “Timers”, people not aware of Eternity and that still exist within the timeline of Reality. Since the reality changes they induce can remove the existence of friends and family from Reality, Eternals are supposed to sever ties with family and forget that they ever existed. Like much time travel-based fiction, keeping tabs on the plot can get confusing, even though there’s a logical framework for how time travel functions in this universe.

End of Eternity cover

For a story written in 1955 (and about as “hard sci-fi” as you can get), I was pleasantly surprised with several scenes that felt like reading a fast-paced thriller, with twists and revelations popping up every few pages for the entire final third of the book. One in particular consists of Harlan entering a point in time he had entered previously, creating the first of several ontological paradoxes that become key plot elements. The characters in the story directly acknowledge these paradoxes, speculate about the effects of an Eternal meeting himself, and even hatch a scheme to save Eternity by intentionally creating one.

The grand experiment of social engineering created by the existence of time travel and reality change in Eternity is questioned by the characters as they imagine the impact of constantly molding time to maintain an unexciting equilibrium. Each time the Sociologists’ “life plots” predict some calamity, like nuclear war, they intervene to level things out. And as it turns out, the intention to do good by removing chaos and chance from the equation stagnates humanity’s expansion to greater things, and creates a never ending cyclical machine. History is doomed to repeat itself.

The best science fiction gives itself space to ruminate on the philosophical and moral implications of technology. I loved this book, and found it to be one of the most creative takes on time travel I’ve read, which says a lot given the quantity and variations on the subject in film, television, and writing. It’s all the more impressive that this was written in 1955, and isn’t even one of Asimov’s better-known works. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in science fiction. Its mystery structure keeps things interesting throughout, from a plot perspective, but it doesn’t shy away from classic sci-fi conventions, either.

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