Talk:The Complete Robot

Robotics Low‑importance

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Novels: Sci-fi Mid‑importance

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Science Fiction Mid‑importance

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Quest[edit]

Now that I have a copy of the complete robot, i am creating/filling in articles on the stories where they are lacking. If anyone wants to help out of they have some kind of strange emotional attachment to the fact that the articles aren't there..please inform me.

I noticed that Sally and Someday not only don't belong to the Robot Series, but is also out of the three laws concept, so I added it to the list --Sumail (talk) 21:37, 13 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Notable Robot Stories[edit]

I'm not sure if it belongs here as an aside, but in the introduction to Robot Visions, Asimov lists notable robot stories. This list includes "Franchise", "The Last Question", and "The Feeling of Power" (see pp 10-16). These stories are about computers, but Asimov adds that computers might be considered immobile robots and that he didn't distinguish between the two as he included the computer story "The Evitable Conflict" in I, Robot. Chiok (talk) 18:08, 26 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Mother Earth...[edit]

...is not a robot story just because it is set in a world which has robots. Robots do not appear in the story or form part of the plot. Not does it belong here just because it has some similar plot elements to The Caves of Steel. Richard75 (talk) 13:21, 15 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Death Sentence[edit]

Death Sentence (short story) also appears to be a positronic robots story. Shouldn't we add that to the list of stories not included in this book? Richard75 (talk) 17:47, 3 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know. This story is about a robot world, but the robots are only talked about, they never make an appearance. And in the end it turns out that these "robots" are actually humans. Also, the fact that Asimov didn't include it in The Complete Robot suggests that he didn't see it as a robot story either. Darkday (talk) 22:29, 3 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

They're described as positronic robots in the story, which rules out that they're organic life-forms. I interpreted the story as meaning that humans had become extinct and had been survived by the robots they built. The fact that they don't actually appear doesn't change the fact that the whole story is about them. It's a good point about Asimov omitting the story from The Complete Robot though, which is the only reason I'm uncertain. Richard75 (talk) 09:12, 4 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I think the "robots" are organic:

They’ve got a protoplasmic base, you know. I don’t think they have the slightest idea they’re robots.

Also, as I understood it, the original observers are from a world called Dorlis:

the observers in this experiment, the original psychologists of Dorlis, passed away with the First Confederation

and they set up their robot experiment on a separate world, the robot world:

The original planners wanted as nearly a completely closed system as possible. Here they are, just as far off the trade routes as possible, in a thinly populated region of space. The whole idea was to have the robots develop free of interference.

This means that the city called New York on the robot world was apparently named so by robots. So at least to me it seems that Asimov used the term "robots" to mislead the reader, and in the end it turns out that they weren't robots (in the classical sense) after all. This might explain why Asimov didn't include the story in any of his robot collections (I, Robot, The Rest of the Robots, The Complete Robot, Robot Dreams, Robot Visions). Darkday (talk) 20:16, 4 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

That all makes sense, thanks. Richard75 (talk) 23:19, 4 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]