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Isaac Asimov
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 Isaac Asimov used the figure of the robot often in his most memorable science fiction of the
1950s, culminating in his famous novels, The Caves of
Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957). His famous "Three
Laws" of robotics were generally accepted by all sf writers by 1950. But by the early 1950s, a new image
from contemporary science was emerging in sf that began to push the ambulatory humanoid machines aside: the
big computers -- huge thinking machines, each one bigger and better than the previous generation, that
might someday equal or surpass the capabilities of the human brain. The evolution of pure machine intelligence
(as opposed to robot "men") became a recurring theme in science fiction, growing in strength over the
decades until it became a central concern of much of the literature in the 1980s, especially among the cyberpunks.
At the start of the Golden Age, Robert A. Heinlein's Hamilton Felix in
Beyond This Horizon had said that the real job of humanity and science is to confront the ultimate metaphysical questions. But in the 1950s
John W. Campbell was not interested in metaphysical stories that suggested a machine's superiority to a human,
so Asimov published this innovative, uncharacteristic work (1956) in a minor market, Science Fiction Quarterly.
The evolution of thinking machines was an enduring theme in the fiction of Isaac Asimov; he
wrote several stories about Multivac, the ultimate computer, including "The Life and Times of Multivac" earlier in
this book, and the current story. As late as 1990 he claimed "The Last Question" was his favorite of all
his own stories. "It was an idea which excited me and which I was sure had never been done before." From the
humanoid robots of his early stories, to the huge computers of his fifties work, to the (again) humanoids of
his last robot novels, advances in machine intelligence fascinated him, were the springboard for some of his
finest flights of speculation. In this uncharacteristically Stapledonian story, the hugest scale in time and space
is compressed and distilled, physics yields to metaphysics, creation occurs.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.