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Page 52
passively, unambiguously, and virtually invisibly between the reader and the story. While it seldom adds much to enjoyment of the story, it seldom detracts from it either unless the reader demands something that Asimov and the story are unprepared to give.
The robot stories and almost all Asimov fiction play themselves on a relatively bare stage. The reader perceives only those stage properties that are essential to the plot, and those only in general details. Mercury, the closest planet to the sun and the scene of "Runaround," could have called forth descriptions of the unique qualities of that unusual planet (and has in stories by other authors), but it is presented only in terms of heat and brightness: "The sunlight came down in a white-hot wash and played liquidly around them." The reader is denied even a description of the selenium pool, whatever that might be. Solar Station #5, in "Reason," exists only in terms such as "officer's room," "control room,'' and "engine room." So it is with the rest of the stories.
The characters in the robot stories fill the requirements for what they must do and little more. Gloria's attachment to Robbie and Robbie's faithful dedication to Gloria make them a pleasantly sentimental pair, but Gloria's parents are stock parents: the foolish but determined mother and the sympathetic but manipulable father. Unless readers pay close attention in the Powell and Donovan stories, they may find it difficult to remember that Powell is English and logical, Donovan is Irish and impulsive. The use of such pairs (as well as larger groupings of friends and colleagues) had become conventional in science fiction by then. Campbell had written a series of early stories about two cosmic explorers, Penton and Blake (as well as a series featuring three scientists, Arcot, Morey, and Wade), and was fond of suggesting his solutions to writers who wrote for him. Later Asimov used a pair almost identical to Powell and Donovan in his juveniles, Lucky Starr and Bigman.
The antagonists in the robot stories, where such exist, are seldom characterized at all. The employees of USR, however, begin to assume greater life: Robertson, Lanning, Bogert, and finally Susan Calvin herself. The closer the characters work with robots the more interesting characteristics they accumulate. Susan Calvin clearly became a favorite of Asimov's. "As time went on," he wrote in The Rest of the Robots, "I fell in love with Dr. Calvin." She is plain, stiff, forbidding, unemotional, logical "much more like the popular conception of a robot than any of my positronic creations," Asimov continued. She is a character much like Mr. Spock in Star Trek, who became, accidentally one would assume, the catalyst for the popularity of that series. The reader comes to love Susan Calvin too.

 
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