|
|
|
|
|
|
The analogy between Blacks and robots is obvious in most of Asimov's work, though he makes half-hearted attempts at covering it up (for instance, both in "Strikebreaker" and in The Naked Sun [1956] he compares the social system to that of ancient Sparta, rather than contemporary Alabama). The fear that the Earth may be surreptitiously integrated by an infiltration of humanoid robots hints at miscegenation, and reproduces the obsession with light-skinned Blacks "passing" into the white race. The question of "passing" is at the root of Asimov's finest robot character, R. Daneel Olivaw. He knows he cannot be accepted as an equal among humans but cannot understand why, since he feels in no way their inferior. He takes a special pleasure in passing for human in front of his human detective colleague, an expert in robotics, a fanatic anti-robot extremist. "Passing" is also the theme of ''Evidence," a story about a robot who manages to get elected mayor in an anti-robot community (and then again, he may not have been a robot after all: as in Faulkner's Light in August, it is not the fact so much as the doubt of passing which makes it so dreadful). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Olivaw's plea is presented in such a way as to induce the reader to sympathize with him. He is one of the few Asimov characters endowed with more than a rudimentary psychology, including a sort of straight-faced, Buster-Keaton humor each time he takes seriously human contradictions and nonsense. But he is entitled to sympathy, after all, because he is so much like uslike Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin, who is so much like white folks it's a shame she's Black. Indeed, the double nature of robotsas machines and as a metaphor for Blacksinvolves Asimov in an intricate contradiction: thanks to the fiction he has set up, he cannot support the comparatively respectable cause of racial integration without at the same time supporting the more controversial cause of automation and unemployment. According to the solution he works out in his more recent stories, he seems to be in favor of stressing the racial over the industrial metaphor. In the stories collected in The Bicentennial Man (1976), the parallel between robots and Blacks, far from being covered up, is emphasized and made all the more obvious. The book's title story is remarkable for its skillful treatment of miscegenation: man and robot become more organic. The story may indeed be read as the SF counter-version of Alex Haley's Bicentennial bestseller, Roots: it tells of the robot's fidelity to his owner's family through several generations, and of his final acceptance as a human being (on the point of death and as a unique, exceptional case) once he has successfully |
|
|
|
|
|