|
|
|
|
|
|
games that he says could lead to human genetic changes that would create a humanity more likely to accept Multivac's direction. Bakst is viewed as a traitor to humanity but uses Multivac's distraction to uncouple a joint at a key spot and burn out the computer. At the end, as the other rebels stare at him, Bakst asks uncertainly, "Isn't that what you want?" Such ambiguity is unusual in Asimov. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
"The Tercentenary Incident," Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, August 1976, offered a new look at the question of the robot as political leader. At a Fourth of July celebration around the Washington Monument in 2076, the President of the United States, which now is a part of a planetary Federation, is disintegrated. But he then appears upon the platform to announce that what had happened had been the breakdown of a robot made to serve certain presidential functions. President Winkler becomes a great President. But a Secret Service agent named Edwards, who had seen the incident, believes that the real President had been disintegrated by a new and secret weapon and replaced by a robot. Edwards tries to convince the President's personal secretary of this truth, and urges him to observe the President closely and, if he discovers sufficient evidence, to persuade him to resign. But the secretary turns out to have been part of the scheme from the beginning and now must do away with Edwards. Asimov noted in an afterword that this story was a return to the theme developed in "Evidence" thirty years previously and suggested that he had come up with a better story and perhaps a better answer to the question of robots and political power. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
"The Bicentennial Man," Stellar Science Fiction, No. 2, February 1976, provides a kind of counterpart to "Robbie." Like Robbie, NDR ("Andrew") is a loyal and loving servant. He loves and serves the Martins. Unlike Robbie, Andrew not only can talk but, by some strange combination of brain pathways, can also create art and learn. The Martin family benefits by selling his art but also deposits half the income in a bank for Andrew's benefit and sees that he is provided every robot improvement. Finally, Andrew asks to buy his freedom, begins to wear clothes, writes a history of robots, obtains legal rights for robots, has his brain put in an organic body, and becomes a robobiologist. While USR develops ways of making robots with more precise positronic pathways (to avoid a repetition of Andrew) and then of making robots controlled by a central brain (as in "With Folded Hands"), Andrew develops a system for gaining energy for his new body from the combustion of hydrocarbons. He also learns to reason that what seems like cruelty might, in the long run, be kindness. When asked where all this is leading, |
|
|
|
|
|