First posted July 27, 2009
Last update Aug 4, 2009
More compleat descriptions may be found on Wikipedia W
The Compleat Robot, A collection of short stories by Isaac Asimov The Complete Robot is a collection of 31 science fiction short stories by Isaac Asimov written between 1940 and 1976, which were previously collected in books I, Robot, The Rest of the Robots, and other anthologies. Although working well enough as standalone stories, they share a theme of the interaction of humans, robots and morality, and put together tell a larger story of Asimov's fictional history of robotics.
7:39
A Boy's Best Friend
This story is set far in the future when habitation of the Moon has already taken place. Jimmy Anderson is a Moon-born ten-year old, and he owns a robotic dog named Robutt, whom he comes to love. However, his parents want him to have a real dog, a Scottish Terrier. Since Moon-borns cannot visit Earth, his parents bring the dog to the Moon. But since the relationship between Jimmy and Robutt is so close, Jimmy decides not to have the 'living' dog and keep the 'fake' dog Robutt instead
42:34
Sallie
The story portrays a future where the only cars allowed on the road are those that contain positronic brains, so they don't require a human driver. The cars are not strictly speaking robots, as they don't communicate verbally, although they can communicate via slamming doors and honking their horns, and by the patterns of cylinder knocking by misfiring.
25:18
Someday May 1956
The story is set in a future where computers play a central role in organising society. Humans are employed as computer operators, but they leave most of the thinking to machines. Indeed, whilst binary programming is taught at school, reading and writing have become obsolete.
The story concerns a pair of boys who dismantle and upgrade an old Bard, a child's computer whose sole function is to generate random fairy tales. The boys download a book about computers into the Bard's memory in an attempt to expand its vocabulary, but the Bard simply incorporates computers into its standard fairy tale repertoire. The story ends with the boys excitedly leaving the room after deciding to go to the library to learn "squiggles" (writing). As they leave, one of the boys accidentally kicks the Bard's on switch. The Bard begins reciting a new story, ending with the words: "the little computer knew then that computers would always grow wiser and more powerful until someday-- someday-- someday-- . . . "
8:10
Point of View 1975
Roger's father works with a supercomputer called a Multivac, which has been malfunctioning lately as it comes up with different solutions each time to problems it is asked to solve. After coworkers tell him to take a break, he takes Roger out to lunch. His father tells him what he thinks is wrong with the Multivac, and then from this Roger decides that it is like a child, and like one needs a break from work, saying that if you made a kid do work all day than it would get stuff wrong on purpose. His father reassure this inference with Roger, who confirms it saying, "Dad, a kid's got to play too."
22:30
Think
Genevieve Renshaw summons her colleagues; James Berkowitz and Adom Orsino, to show a new discovery that has kept her busy enough for her to ignore all of her other work. She has been able to advance the science of the electroencephalogram by applications of a laser. She compares the current technology in that area to listening to all of the people on two and a half Earth's, not much can be discovered from this listening. Her laser electroencephalogram(LEG), can scan each individual brain cell so rapidly that there is no temperature change, and yet more information is given. She successfully tests this on a marmoset and later Orsino, and then realizes that the LEG allows telepathy. The story ends revealing that the LEG also allows people to talk to computers as independent intelligences, or from person to person.
10:25
True Love
Milton Davidson is trying to find his ideal partner. To do this, he instructs his computer (named Joe), which has access to databases covering the entire populace of the world, to find him his ideal match, based on physical parameters supplied.
He meets the shortlisted candidates, but realises that looks alone are not enough to find an ideal match. In order to correlate personalities, he speaks at great length to Joe, gradually filling Joe's databanks with information about his personality.
In doing so, Joe develops the personality of Milton, and upon finding an ideal match, arranges to have Milton arrested, so that Joe can 'have the girl' for himself.
34:43
Robot AL-76 Goes Astray
AL-76 (aka Al) is a robot designed for mining work on the Moon, but as a result of an accident after leaving the factory of US Robots and Mechanical Men, it gets lost and finds itself in rural Virginia. It can't comprehend the unfamiliar environment and the people it meets are scared of it. When it comes across a shed full of spare parts and junk, it is moved to reprogram itself and builds a powerful mining tool of the kind it was designed to use on the Moon - but since it doesn't have the proper parts, it improvises and produces a better model, requiring less power. When angrily told to destroy it and forget all about it, it obeys, and the secret of the reprogramming and the improved tool is lost.
52:38
Victory Unintentional
Human colonists on Ganymede send three extremely powerful and durable robots, ZZ One, ZZ Two, and ZZ Three, to explore the surface of Jupiter and contact the Jovians.
They discover that the Jovians have a vastly larger population than the humans, since Jupiter has a much greater surface area than Earth. They're also more advanced scientifically. More than anything, the Jovians are arrogant, threatening to use force-field technology to leave Jupiter, in order to destroy humanity. But they mistake the immensely strong and resistant robots for humans. The robots, oblivious to this misconception, unintentionally demonstrate their superiority in several incidents, including their ability to exist in a vacuum, lack of need for an atmosphere, and ability to withstand extremely cold and hot environments. The Jovians' belief in their own superiority crumbles and, to save face, they swear eternal peace with the humans.
1:11:16
Stranger in Paradise
Anthony Smith and William Anti-Aut are full brothers who live in a post-catastrophe world where, due to concerns about humanity's limited genetic diversity, full siblings are rare (and identical twins are nonexistent). Not only are they full brothers, they also look alike, which is totally unheard of.
12:35
Light Verse
After her husband's death, Mrs. Lardner receives a large pension, which she invests wisely, becoming very wealthy. She buys many valuable jeweled artifacts from a number of countries, and displays them in her home. She then takes up the art of light-sculpture, which fascinates many, but she refuses to sell her works and only paints them at parties.
13:27
Segregationist
The story takes place in a future where robotic limbs and artificial organic limbs for robots and human beings have been created. Many humans have taken on robotic limbs and many robots have taken on artificial organic limbs, making the two appear more similar. The story centers on a visit by a man to the doctor's office. The doctor, who is to perform heart replacement surgery on the man, offers him a choice between a metallic or semi-organic one. The man stubbornly refuses the doctor's attempts to persuade him to accept an organic heart, saying that it's "weak."
As the man is leaving, the doctor remarks to a robotic aide that he would rather that humans and robots stick to being humans and robots instead of replacing their body parts with those that would make them similar to each other. The robot aide remarks that such talk was "segregationist," to which the doctor replies that he "doesn't care." At the end, the doctor is revealed to be a robot.
53:34
Robbie
The story centers around the technophobia that surrounds robots, and how it is misplaced. Almost all previously published science fiction stories featuring robots followed the theme 'robot turns against creator'; Asimov has consistently held the belief that the Frankenstein complex was a misplaced fear, and the majority of his works attempted to provide examples of the help that robots could provide humanity.
41:16
Let's Get Together
The Cold War has endured for a century and an uneasy peace between Us and Them exists. A secret agent arrives in America from Moscow with the story that robots identical in appearance and behaviour have been developed by Them and that ten have already been infiltrated into America. When they get together, they will trigger a nuclear-level explosion (they are components of a total conversion bomb). A conference of the greatest minds in American robotics is hastily convened to decide how to detect these robots and how to catch up on this technology. Almost too late, the head of the Bureau of Robotics realises that Their plan exactly anticipates this: the infiltrator robots have replaced scientists invited to this conference, and while the explosion would kill a relatively small number of people, it would precisely include America's top robotics experts, and that the conference must be called off, even though people are already travelling to it. His guess is proven correct almost immediately, as ten of the scientists en route explode via self-destruct charges. But... how could the They have discovered so quickly that the plan had been discovered? The truth dawns on the head of the Bureau of Robotics, he pulls a gun and blows the secret agent's head off, and the body slumps forward "leaking not blood, but high-grade machine oil".
40:47
Mirror Image
Baley is unexpectedly contacted by Daneel to help resolve an authorship dispute between two Spacer scientists. Being Spacers, neither scientist is willing to allow himself to be interrogated by an Earthman, but they are willing to allow Baley to interrogate their personal robots. The two robots are the same model, and their stories are mirror images of each other: each one insists that his own master came up with a key scientific insight, and that the other scientist is falsely trying to lay claim to it. Clearly, one of the robots is telling the truth, while the other has been ordered by its master to lie. Baley must use the Three Laws of Robotics and his own knowledge of human nature to determine which is which
41:48
The Tercentenary Incident
This story begins on 4 July 2076. The United States itself is no longer a sovereign country, but part of a Global Federation. The story details the speech of the 57th president, Hugo Allen Winkler, who is described by Secret Service agent Lawrence Edwards as a "vote-grabber, a promiser" who has failed to get anything done during his first term in office. The president is walking near the Washington Monument, and suddenly disappears. He reappears very shortly afterwards on a guarded stage and gives a stirring speech which is quite different from the kind he usually makes. Two years after that occurrence, Edwards talks to a government official named Janek, to whom he describes a possible murder weapon, a disintegrator. Edwards explains that a robot double of the president exists as a security measure, and then correctly surmises that it was not the robot double who had died, but the president himself. The robot had then taken office.
7:46
First Law
The story is very short, only 3 pages in length, and takes the form of Mike Donovan's recount of an incident that occurred on Titan, one of Saturn's moons. He tells of a malfunctioning robot named Emma that escaped from the base and was later encountered by Donovan while he was lost during a storm. While Donovan's life was in danger, Emma chose to protect its offspring, a small robot that it had built, instead of assisting him. This was a direct violation of the First Law of Robotics, which states that "a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm". Apparently, maternal instincts in the robot took precedence over its programming, an example of the commonly encountered literary theme of paternalism in Asimov's work.
49:07
Runaround
In 2015, Powell, Donovan and Robot SPD-13 (aka "Speedy") are sent to Mercury to restart operations at a mining station which was abandoned ten years before.
They discover that the photo-cell banks that provide life support to the base are short on selenium and will soon fail. The nearest selenium pool is seventeen miles away, and since Speedy can withstand Mercury’s high temperatures, Donovan sends him to get it. Powell and Donovan become worried when they realize that Speedy has not returned after five hours. They use a more primitive robot to retrieve Speedy and try to analyze what happened to it.
49:29
Reason
Powell and Donovan are assigned to a space station which supplies energy via microwave beams to the planets. The robots that control the energy beams are in turn co-ordinated by QT1, known to Powell and Donovan as Cutie, an advanced model with highly developed reasoning ability. Using these abilities, it decides that space, stars and the planets beyond the station don't really exist, and that the humans that visit the station are unimportant, short-lived and expendable. It invents its own religion, serving the power source of the ship (Master), concluding that it must become the Prophet of the Master and disregard human commands as inferior. It asserts "I myself, exist, because I think -". The sardonic response of the humans is, "Oh, Jupiter, a robot Descartes!"
50:50
Catch that Rabbit
The recurring team of Powell and Donovan are in charge of field tests on an asteroid mining station with a robot, DV-5 (Dave). But the robot stops producing ore, and cannot explain why. The robot is a new model with six subsidiary robots under its control via positronic fields, a means of transmission not yet fully understood by roboticists. When they secretly observe the robot, it starts performing strange marches and dances with its subsidiaries whenever something unexpected happens. It is up to the two field testers to figure out why Dave is acting the way he is. This observation-dependent behavior alteration, hindering the resolution of the robots' behavioral bug, makes it an early example of a Heisenbug. The reason is that the main robot had too many subsidiary robots under his control. This overloaded his brain capacity, so it malfunctioned, and he danced. Why did the robots stop dancing when the humans where watching them? Because when the humans where around, the robots where put under pressure of the second law (A robot must obey humans). The robots could not directly disobey the humans orders (mine rock) when the humans where watching them.
49:06
Liar!
Through a fault in manufacturing, a robot, HRB-34 (Herbie), is created that has the ability to read minds. While the roboticists at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men are trying to analyze what happened and why, the robot tells them what other people are thinking. But the First Law still applies to this robot, and so it deliberately lies when necessary to avoid hurting their feelings, especially in terms of the problem it was initially designed to solve. However, by lying, it is hurting them anyway. When it is confronted with this fact by Susan Calvin (to whom it told a lie that was particularly painful to her when it was shown to be false), the robot experiences an irresolvable logical conflict, which results in a total mental breakdown.
40:29
Satisfaction Guaranteed
Robot TN-3 (aka Tony) is designed as a humaniform household robot, an attempt by US Robots to get robots accepted in the home. He is placed with Claire Belmont, whose husband works for the company, as an experiment, but she is reluctant to accept him. Tony realizes that Claire has a very low self-esteem and an inferiority complex, and tries to help her by redecorating her house and giving her a make-over. Finally, he pretends to be her lover, and deliberately lets the neighbors see him making love to (kissing) Claire, thus increasing her self-esteem. In the end, though, Claire falls in love with Tony, but the Three Laws of Robotics are slightly broken since at first Claire is very bewildered and screams when the robot hugs her. In the end, the TN-3 robot models are rebuilt.
38:16
Lenny
US Robots is planning the production of the LNE series of robots, which are designed for boron mining in the asteroid belt. As a result of a curious tourist on a public tour of the company, the prototype is manufactured with a faulty brain, giving it a personality equivalent to that of a human infant, and it can't speak except in "baby talk".
1:31:03
Galley Slave
The story is a courtroom drama. It opens in 2033, with Simon Ninheimer, a professor of sociology, suing US Robots for loss of professional reputation. He contends that robot EZ-27 (aka "Easy"), while leased to North Eastern University for use as a proofreader, deliberately altered and rewrote parts of his book Social Tensions Involved in Space Flight and their Resolution when it checked the galley proofs (hence the title). Ninheimer holds that the alterations to his book make him appear an incompetent scholar who has misrepresented the work of his professional colleagues in fields such as criminal justice in absurd ways.
1:09:37
Little Lost Robot
At Hyper Base, a military research station on an asteroid, scientists are working to develop the hyperspace drive - a theme that is explored and developed in several of Asimov's stories and mentioned in the Empire and Foundation books. One of the researchers, Gerald Black, loses his temper, swears at an NS-2 (Nestor) robot and tells the robot to "....go lose yourself." Obeying the order literally, it hides itself. It is then up to US Robots' Chief Robopsychologist Dr. Susan Calvin, and Mathematical Director Peter Bogert, to find it. They even know exactly where it is: in a room with 62 other physically identical robots
1:13:52
Risk
The researchers at Hyper Base are ready to test the first hyperspace ship, which has a positronic robot at the controls as it is considered too risky to use a human pilot. The ship fails to function as planned, and Susan Calvin persuades Gerald Black, an etherics engineer, to board the ship in order to locate the fault.
As Calvin suspects, Black finds that the fault lies with the robot, which, as a result of imprecise orders, has damaged the controls of the ship. They realize that the precise and finite robot mind must be compensated for by human ingenuity.
1:00:13
Escape!
Many research organizations are working to develop the hyperspatial drive. The company U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., is approached by its biggest competitor that has plans for a working hyperspace engine that allows humans to survive the jump (a theme which would be further developed in future Asimov stories). But the staff of U.S. Robots is wary, because, in performing the calculations, their rival's (non-positronic) supercomputer has destroyed itself.
59:43
Evidence
Stephen Byerley is a lawyer, a successful, middle-aged prosecutor, a humanitarian who never presses for the death penalty. He runs for Mayor of New York City, but Francis Quinn's political machine smears him, claiming that he is a humanoid robot, that is, a machine built to look like a human being. If this is true, the "Frankenstein complex" hysteria will ruin his campaign, as of course, only human beings are allowed to run for office. Quinn approaches U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men corporation, the world's only supplier of positronic robot brains, and attempts to persuade them that Byerley must be a robot. No one has ever seen Byerley eat or sleep, Quinn reports.
1:02:37
The Evitable Conflict
The "Machines", powerful positronic computers which are used to optimize the world's economy and production, start giving instructions that appear to go against their function. Although each glitch is minor when taken by itself, the fact that they exist at all is alarming. Stephen Byerley, now elected World Co-ordinator, consults the four other Regional Coordinators and then asks Susan Calvin for her opinion.
1:00:10
Feminine Intuition
Clinton Madarian, the successor to Susan Calvin at US Robots, who has just retired, initiates a project to create a "feminine" robot, which not only has female physical characteristics but will, it is hoped, have a brain with "feminine intuition". After several failures, JN-5 (aka Jane) is produced and the company plan to use it (her) to analyse astronomical data at the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona to calculate the most likely stars in the vicinity of Earth to have habitable planets. This will allow the most effective use of the hyperspace drive to explore those stars.
1:01:45
--That Thou art Mindful of Him
In this story, Asimov describes US Robots's attempt to introduce robots on the planet Earth. (He uses this basic premise in several stories, including "Galley Slave" and "The Bicentennial Man", making it difficult to place all of his robot stories into a coherent chronology.) Robots have already been in use on space stations and planetary colonies, where the inhabitants are mostly highly trained scientists and engineers. U.S. Robots faces the problem that on Earth, their robots will encounter a wide variety of people, not all of whom are trustworthy or responsible, yet the Three Laws require robots to obey all human orders and devote equal effort to protecting all human lives. Plainly, robots must be programmed to differentiate between responsible authorities and those giving random, whimsical orders.
1:45:25
The Bicentennial Man
In the twenty-first century the creation of the positronic brain leads to the development of robot laborers and revolutionizes life on Earth. But to the Martin family, their household robot NDR-113 is more than a mechanical servant. "Andrew" has become a trusted friend, a confidant, and a member of the Martin family.
