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Several of the stories feature the character of Dr. Susan Calvin, chief robopsychologist at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., the major manufacturer of robots. Upon their publication in this collection, Asimov wrote a framing sequence presenting the stories as Calvin's reminiscences during an interview with her about her life's work, chiefly concerned with aberrant behaviour of robots, and the use of ' robopsychology' to sort them out.

The book also contains the short story in which Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics first appear. Other characters that appear in these short stories are Powell and Donovan, a field-testing team which locates flaws in USRMM's prototype models.

The collection's title was applied earlier to a short story by Eando (Earl and Otto) Binder. Asimov originally titled his collection Mind and Iron, and initially objected when the publisher changed the title.

1 I, Robot

The following appeared on the back cover of I, Robot (paperback edition):

To you, a robot is just a robot. But you haven't worked with them. You don't know them. They're a cleaner, better breed than we are.

When Earth is ruled by master-machines... when robots are more human than humankind.

Isaac Asimov's unforgettable, spine-chilling vision of the future - available at last in its first paperback edition.

This is largely inaccurate. The first paragraph is a quotation from one of the book's recurring characters, Dr. Susan Calvin, but the rest is incongruous with the themes that Asimov presents in his stories. At the time of the collection's publication, robots were depicted in science fiction as either servile machines or evil creations that revolted in the manner of FrankensteinFrankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus is a novel by Mary Shelley. First published on March 11, 1818 (but more often read in the revised and corrected third edition, published in 1831), it is an early example of science fiction and steampunk. Some (led by. Asimov himself said that in writing the Robot stories he sought to replace both views with something more rational.

1.1 Stories

• " RobbieFoundation universe books Robbie ( 1940) (also known as Strange Playfellow is science-fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. This story is basically about the technophobia that surrounds robots, and how it is misplaced. This is not such a strange place to s"
• " RunaroundFoundation universe books Runaround ( 1941) is science-fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. A robot designed to mine selenium on Mercury's surface goes missing. The two humans on the planet, Powell and Donovan, go and retrieve the robot and try to analyse"
• " ReasonFoundation universe books Reason ( 1942) is science-fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. Powell and Donovan from Runaround are back, but this time on a space station supplying energy via beams to the planets. The robot that controls the energy beams has b"
• " Catch That Rabbit"
• " Liar!Foundation universe books Liar ( 1941) is science-fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. Somehow, a robot is created that has the ability to read minds. While the heads of U. Robots and Mechanical Men are trying to analyse what happened, the robot tells the"
• " Little Lost Robot"
• " Escape!"
• " Evidence"
• " The Evitable Conflict"