7 Fascinating Facts About Isaac Asimov’s ‘I, Robot’

Writer Isaac Asimov was incredibly prolific, penning hundreds of short stories, novels, and non-fiction books throughout his lifetime. But two of his books outpace the rest in terms of popularity: I, Robot (1950) and Foundation (1951). The former is a collection of nine short stories about robots that are presented as an interview with robopsychologist Dr. Susan Calvin. Here are seven things you might not know about the influential sci-fi book, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year.

1. I, Robot was named after a short story written by another author—over Isaac Asimov’s objections.
2. I, Robot popularized the Three Laws of Robotics.
3. Asimov coined two new words in “Liar!”: robotics and positronic.
4. Harlan Ellison wrote a screenplay based on I, Robot—but it was never produced.
5. The 2004 I, Robot movie is only loosely related to Asimov’s book.
6. I, Robot was followed by a series of robot stories—one which authors other than Asimov also contributed to.
7. I, Robot has influenced popular culture.

I, Robot was named after a short story written by another author—over Isaac Asimov’s objections.

In the late 1930s, Isaac Asimov read a short story by Eando Binder (the pen name of brothers Earl and Otto Binder) called “I, Robot,” a confession from a self-aware and sympathetic robot. Soon afterward, Asimov wrote his very first robot story, “Robbie” (1940), which 10 years later became the first story in I, Robot. Asimov had initially titled his fix-up novel Mind and Iron, but Martin Greenberg at Gnome Press wanted to go with I, Robot—despite the fact that the title had already been used by the Binder brothers. Asimov protested, but to no avail, and he later admitted in his autobiography that the “title was far better than mine and probably helped sell the book.”

Asimov also credits Neil R. Jones’s The Jameson Satellite (1931)—which he read at the age of 11—with influencing his take on robots, calling Jones’s mechanical Zoromes “the spiritual ancestors of my own ‘positronic robots’.”

I, Robot popularized the Three Laws of Robotics.

Although Asimov had written robot stories according to his Laws of Robotics before—“Robbie,” “Reason,” and “Liar!”—he first explicitly outlined them in his 1942 short story “Runaround” (all four stories were later included in I, Robot). Here are the Three Laws of Robotics (which were initially called “Rules of Robotics”):

1. “A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”
2. “A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.”
3. “A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”

The nine stories in I, Robot explore the various conflicts that robots can experience in interpreting and applying these laws. For instance, in “Liar!” a robot mentally collapses after being caught in a paradox when it realizes that the lies it was telling to protect Susan Calvin’s feelings have themselves caused her emotional pain.

Although Asimov is credited with creating the laws, he declared that they were “obvious from the start, and everyone is aware of them subliminally. The laws just never happened to be put into brief sentences until I managed to do the job.” The laws aren’t only bound to fiction, though—they’ve played a part in real-world discussions about regulating artificial intelligence. When asked about the laws being applied in reality, Asimov stated that they “are the only way in which rational human beings can deal with robots—or with anything else. But when I say that, I always remember (sadly) that human beings are not always rational.”

Asimov coined two new words in “Liar!”: robotics and positronic.

The word robot was introduced in 1921 in Karel Čapek’s sci-fi play R.U.R., and in the 1941 short story “Liar!,” Asimov added -ics to the end to create robotics. Asimov assumed the word already existed because -ics was the customary suffix for a field of study (e.g. linguistics), but he was actually the first person to use the word in print.

Although less widely used, Asimov is also credited with creating the word positronic. James Blish’s “Trail of the Comet” (1936) technically contains the earliest known use of positronic, but it’s an undefined, throwaway term, and therefore isn’t considered a contender for first use. It’s Asimov’s “Liar!” which first refers to the positronic brain of a robot—a term and concept that has informed the consciousness of robotic beings in other sci-fi stories, including Star Trek (it’s the type of brain that Data has) and Doctor Who.

I, Robot’s stories—And Where They Were Originally Published

Harlan Ellison wrote a screenplay based on I, Robot—but it was never produced.

In the late ’70s, Harlan Ellison—best-known for writing “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1967), the Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever” (1967), and A Boy and His Dog (1969)—was hired to write the screenplay for an adaptation of I, Robot. After reading the script in 1978, Asimov wrote to Ellison to tell him that he thought it could lead to “the first really adult, complex, worthwhile science fiction movie ever made” (which is quite the insult to earlier sci-fi films, including 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1973’s Soylent Green, and 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind).

But plans for the film went off the rails when Ellison met with Robert Shapiro, head of production at Warner Bros., to discuss the screenplay. From the notes he was given, Ellison concluded that Shapiro hadn’t even read the script and told him that he had “the intellectual capacity of an artichoke!” Ellison was kicked off the project and the studio wasn’t able to find a writer or director to complete the film.

Although Ellison’s vision—which put Susan Calvin in a Citizen Kane-esque story (but with robots, of course)—never made it to the screen, his screenplay was published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1987 and then as an illustrated book in 1994.

The 2004 I, Robot movie is only loosely related to Asimov’s book.

Despite being called I, Robot, the 2004 film—directed by Alex Proyas and starring Will Smith—has a very limited connection to Asimov’s book and in the end credits is merely said to be “suggested by” it. The film is actually based on an original script, called Hardwired, by Jeff Vintar. When 20th Century Fox acquired the rights to I, Robot, Vintar was asked to include elements of the book in his robotic murder mystery. Aside from sharing a title, the only other similarities are the Three Laws, having a robopsychologist character called Susan Calvin, and a scene of a robot hiding in a room full of identical robots (in Asimov’s book, this happens in “Little Lost Robot”).

The 2004 movie actually goes directly against what Asimov was doing in I, Robot. “I wrote a series of influential robot stories that self-consciously combated the ‘Frankenstein complex’ and made of the robots the servants, friends, and allies of humanity,” the author explained in a 1978 essay. Essentially, Asimov was writing counter to stories of robots turning on their creators in the way that the monster turns on its maker in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). In Asimov’s book, robots remain subservient to humans; in the 2004 film, robots rebel against humanity.

I, Robot was followed by a series of robot stories—one which authors other than Asimov also contributed to.

The stories collected in I, Robot were just the beginning of Asimov’s writings on robots, with the author penning an entire Robot series. The majority of Asimov’s robot short stories—31 of a total 37—can be found in The Complete Robot (1982). He also penned five full-length robot novels: The Caves of Steel (1953), The Naked Sun (1956), The Robots of Dawn (1983), Robots and Empire (1985), and, with co-author Robert Silverberg, The Positronic Man (1992).

Asimov—and, after his death in 1992, his estate—also authorized other authors to publish stories in the Robot series. The first of these stories appeared in the anthology Foundation’s Friends (1989). Then Roger MacBride Allen and Mark W. Tiedemann each wrote a trilogy of Robot novels in the ’90s and ’00s respectively. Alexander C. Irvine’s Have Robot, Will Travel was published in 2004. And most recently, between 2011 and 2016, Mickey Zucker Reichert wrote a trilogy of prequels to I, Robot.

I, Robot has influenced popular culture.

The influence of I, Robot—particularly the Three Laws—can be seen throughout pop culture. In addition to Data’s positronic brain, two episodes of Star Trek—“I, Mudd” (1967) and “I, Borg” (1992)—are riffs on I, Robot’s title and themes. Both the Doctor Who episode “The Robots of Death” (1977) and James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) paraphrase Asimov’s First Law about robots being unable to harm humans. The laws are also discussed in The Big Bang Theory episode “The Fuzzy Boots Corollary” (2007) and in the 2014 The Simpsons/Futurama crossover episode. In the former, the possibility of Sheldon being a robot is debated; in the latter, Lisa asks Bender if he can’t kill Homer because of Asimov’s laws, to which he replies, “you think robots care what some hack science fiction writer thinks?”

The Three Laws are also referenced in sci-fi video games, including Portal 2 (where instead of robots having the laws encoded, they’ve instead been given one physical copy to ineffectively share), Borderlands 2, and the Halo series (both of which feature robots that can ignore the First Law).

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