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Page 65
of fifty years, Asimov let various inconsistencies creep in. This is apparent not simply in the problem of chronology, which has various minor glitches, but in that of incompatibility: if some of the events took place, others could not. Some inconsistencies, such as those in "The Evitable Conflict," Asimov disposed of by declaring in a later story that the Machines phased themselves out when they thought their job was done (in "That Thou Art Mindful of Him"). Others he simply ignored, such as the fact that the Machines and the Multivac of "The Life and Times of Multivac" could not coexist, nor if Multivac was destroyed could it be "The Machine That Won the War" nor the computer that answered ''The Last Question." And if the robots take over some time after the end of "That Thou Art Mindful of Him," some of the subsequent stories would be not only redundant but impossible. In other cases, as in "Lenny," the invention of the teachable robot is made and then forgotten. "Segregationist" suggests the coexistence and even equality of humans and robots; robots are introduced and reintroduced on Earth, as in "Satisfaction Guaranteed," "Galley Slave," "That Thou Art Mindful of Him," and "The Bicentennial Man," as if none of the other attempts had ever led to anything.
Asimov was eclectic. He never set out to write a consistent future history of the robots, even though the publication and the surprising success of I, Robot, with its parts glued together made it seem as if he had. A certain number of common elements and cross-references has tended to reinforce the illusion. But it would be a mistake to judge the robot stories on this basis. I, Robot is the only self-sufficient and almost self-consistent work and should be adequate for the critic who desires unity.
The robot stories are a body of literature, much like the Scandinavian sagas or the Greek legends, that focuses on the question of how one should respond to the reality of the particular universe in which these groups of stories exist, from a cluster of viewpoints. The greatest value of the robot stories is not in internal consistency but in multiplicity of consideration. In these stories Asimov provided readers with the unique excitement of an inquiring and artistic mind returning again and again to a single question and discovering not only new variations but sometimes different answers.

 
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