The Naked Sun

DEAD ENDS

“I suppose the murderer is completely unknown,” Baley said.

Gruer looked particularly uneasy. “No, I cannot say the murderer is completely unknown. In fact, there is only one person that can possibly have done the deed.”

“Are you sure you don’t mean only one person who is
likely
to have done the deed?”

Gruer shook his bald head. “No. Only one possible person. Anyone else is impossible. Completely impossible.”

“Completely?”

“I assure you.”

“Then you have no problem,” Baley concluded.

“On the contrary. We do have a problem. That one person couldn’t have done it either.”

Also by Isaac Asimov
available from Bantam Books

The Foundation Novels

PRELUDE TO FOUNDATION

FOUNDATION

FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE

SECOND FOUNDATION

FOUNDATION’S EDGE

FORWARD THE FOUNDATION

The Robot Novels

I, ROBOT

THE CAVES OF STEEL

THE NAKED SUN

THE ROBOTS OF DAWN

NEMESIS

THE GODS THEMSELVES

FANTASTIC VOYAGE

I, ASIMOV

WITH
R
OBERT
S
ILVERBERG

NIGHTFALL

B
Y
I
SAAC
A
SIMOV

The writing side of my love affair with robots began on May 10, 1939, but as a science-fiction
reader
it began earlier still.

Robots were, after all, nothing new in science fiction, not even in 1939. Mechanical human beings are to be found in ancient and medieval myths and legends, and the word “robot” originally appeared in Karl Capek’s play
R.U.R.
, which was first staged in 1921 in Czechoslovakia, but was soon translated into many languages.

R.U.R
. stands for “Rossum’s Universal Robots.” Rossum, an English industrialist, produced artificial human beings designed to do the labor of the world and to free humanity for a life of creative leisure. (The word “robot” is from a Czech word meaning “compulsory labor.”) Though Rossum meant well, it didn’t work out as he planned: the robots rebelled, and the human species was destroyed.

It is perhaps not surprising that a technological advance, imagined in 1921, was seen as resulting in universal disaster. Remember that World War I, with its tanks, airplanes, and poison gas, had just ended
and had showed people “the dark side of the force,” to use
Star Wars
terminology.

R.U.R
. added its somber view to that of the even more famous
Frankenstein
, in which the creation of another kind of artificial human being also ended in disaster, though on a more limited scale. Following these examples, it became very common, in the 1920s and 1930s, to picture robots as dangerous devices that invariably destroyed their creators. The moral was pointed out over and over again that “there are some things Man was not meant to know.”

Even as a youngster, though, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance. To me, it always seemed that the solution had to be wisdom. You did not refuse to look at danger, rather you learned how to handle it safely.

After all, this has been the human challenge since a certain group of primates became human in the first place.
Any
technological advance can be dangerous. Fire was dangerous from the start, and so (even more so) was speech—and both are still dangerous to this day—but human beings would not be human without them.

At any rate, without quite knowing what dissatisfied me about the robot stories I read, I waited for something better, and I found it in the December 1938 issue of
Astounding Science Fiction
. That issue contained “Helen O’Loy” by Lester del Rey, a story in which a robot was portrayed sympathetically. It was, I believe, only his second story, but I was a del Rey fan forever after. (Please don’t anybody tell him this. He must never know.)

At almost the same time, in the January 1939 issue of
Amazing Stories
, Eando Binder portrayed a
sympathetic robot in
I
,
Robot
. This was much the poorer story of the two, but again I vibrated. Dimly, I began to feel that I wanted to write a story in which a robot would be portrayed lovingly. And on May 10, 1939, I began such a story. The job took me two weeks, for in those days it took me quite a while to write a story.

I called it “Robbie,” and it was about a robot nursemaid, who was loved by the child it cared for and feared by the child’s mother. Fred Pohl (who was also nineteen at the time, and who has matched me year for year ever since) was wiser than I, however. When he read it, he said that John Campbell, the all-powerful editor of
Astounding
, would not take it because it was too much like “Helen O’Loy.” He was right. Campbell rejected it for that very reason.

However, Fred became editor of a pair of new magazines soon after, and
he
took “Robbie” on March 25, 1940. It appeared in the September 1940 issue of
Super-Science Stories
, though its name was changed to “Strange Playfellow.” (Fred had an awful habit of changing titles, almost always for the worse. The story has appeared many times since, but always under my own original title.)

I was, in those days, dissatisfied with any sale not made to Campbell, however, and so I tried another robot story after a while. I discussed the idea with Campbell first, though, to make sure he wouldn’t reject it for anything other than inadequate writing, and then I wrote “Reason,” in which a robot got religion, so to speak.

Campbell bought it on November 22, 1940, and it appeared in the April 1941 issue of his magazine. It was my third sale to him and the first one he had taken as it stood, without requesting revision. I was so
elated by this that I quickly wrote a third robot story, about a mind-reading robot, which I called “Liar!”, and this one Campbell
also
took, and it appeared in the May 1941 issue. I had two robot stories in two successive issues.

After that, I did not intend to stop. I had a series going.

I had more than that. On December 23, 1940, when I was discussing my idea for a mind-reading robot with Campbell, we found ourselves discussing the rules that governed the way in which a robot behaved. It seemed to me that robots were engineering devices with built-in safeguards, and so the two of us began giving verbal form to those safeguards—these became the “Three Laws of Robotics.”

I first worked out the final form of the Three Laws, and used them explicitly, in my fourth robot story, “Runaround,” which appeared in the March 1942 issue of
Astounding
. The Three Laws first appear on page 100 of that issue. I looked that up, because where they appear there is the very first use of the word “robotics” in the history of the world, as far as I know.

I went on to write four more robot stories for
Astounding
in the 1940s. They were “Catch That Rabbit,” “Escape” (which Campbell called “Paradoxical Escape” because two years before he had published a story with “Escape” as the title), “Evidence,” and “The Evitable Conflict.” These appeared in the February 1944, August 1945, September 1946, and June 1950 issues of
Astounding
.

By 1950, important publishing houses, notably Doubleday and Company, were beginning to publish hardcover science fiction. In January 1950, Doubleday published my first book, the science-fiction novel
Pebble in the Sky
, and I was hard at work on a second novel.

It occurred to Fred Pohl, who was my agent for a brief period at that time, that perhaps a book could be made out of my robot stories. Doubleday was not interested in short-story collections at the time, but a very small publishing house, Gnome Press, was.

On June 8, 1950, the collection was handed to Gnome Press, and the title I gave it was
Mind and Iron
. The publisher shook his head.

“Let’s call it
I, Robot,
” he said.

“We can’t,” I said. “Eando Binder wrote a short story with that title ten years ago.”

“Who cares?” said the publisher (though that is a bowdlerized version of what he really said), and I allowed myself, rather uneasily, to be persuaded.
I, Robot
was my second book, and it came out just before the end of 1950.

The book contained my eight robot stories from
Astounding
, with their order rearranged to make a more logical progression. In addition, I included “Robbie,” my first story, because I liked it despite Campbell’s rejection.

I had written three other robot stories in the 1940s that Campbell had either rejected or never seen, but these were not in the direct path of progression of the stories, so I left them out. These, however, and other robot stories written in the decades since
I, Robot
, were included in later collections—all of them, without exception, appeared in
The Complete Robot
, published by Doubleday in 1982.

I, Robot
did not make a big splash on publication, but it sold steadily, if slowly, year after year. Within five years, it had come out in an Armed Forces edition, in a cheaper hardcover edition, in a British edition,
and in a German edition (my first foreign-language appearance). In 1956, it was even published in a paperback edition by New American Library.