are changing the world and driving it in directions we cannot clearly foresee.
Where are these robots-in-reality coming from? The most important single source is a firm called Unimation, Inc., of Danbury, Connecticut. It is the leading manufacturer of industrial robots and is responsible for perhaps one third of all robots that have been installed. The president of the firm is Joseph F. Engelberger, who founded it in the late 1950S because he was so interested in robots that he decided to make their production his life work.
But how in the world did he become so interested in robots so early in the game? According to his own words, he grew interested in robots in the 1940s when he was a physics-major undergraduate at Columbia University, reading the robot stories of his fellow Columbian Isaac Asimov.
My goodness!
You know, I didn't write my robot stories with much in the way of ambition back in those old, old days. All I wanted was to sell them to the magazines in order to earn a few hundred dollars to help pay my college tuition-and to see my name in print besides.
If I had been writing in any other field of literature, that's all I would have attained. But because I was writing science fiction, and only because I was writing science fiction, I-without knowing it-was starting a chain of events that is changing the face of the world.
Joseph F. Engelberger, by the way, published a book in 1980 called Robotics in Practice: Management and Application of Industrial Robots (American Management Associations), and he was kind enough to invite me to write the foreword.
All this set the nice people at Doubleday to thinking-
My various robot short stories have appeared in no less than seven different collections of mine. Why should they be so separated? Since they appear to be far more important than anyone dreamed they would be (least of all, I) at the time they were written, why not pull them together in a single book?
It wasn't hard to get me to agree, so here are thirty-one short stories, totaling some 200,000 words, written over a time period stretching from 1939 to 1977-
Some Non-human Robots A Boy's Best Friend
I am not having the robot stories appear in the order in which they were written. Rather, I am grouping them by the nature of the contents. In this first division, for instance, I deal with robots that have a non-human shape-a dog, an automobile, a box. Why not? The industrial robots that have come into existence in reality are non-human in appearance.
The very first story, "A Boy's Best Friend," is not in any of my earlier collections. It was written on September 10, 1974-and you may find in it a distant echo of "Robbie," written thirty-five years earlier, which appears later in this volume. Don't think I'm not aware of that.
You will note, by the way, that in these three stories, the concept of Robot-as-Pathos is clearly marked. You may also notice, however, that in "Sally" there seems to be no hint of the Three Laws and that there is more than a hint of Robot-as-Menace. Well, if I want to do that once in a while, I can, I suppose. Who's there to stop me?
A Boy's Best Friend
Mr. Anderson said, "Where's Jimmy, dear?"
"Out on the crater," said Mrs. Anderson. "Hell be all right Robutt is with him.-Did he arrive?"
"Yes. He's at the rocket station, going through the tests. Actually, I can hardly wait to see him myself. I haven't really seen one since I left Earth 15 years ago. You can't count films."
"Jimmy has never seen one," said Mrs. Anderson.
"Because he's Moonborn and can't visit Earth. That's why I'm bringing one here. I think it's the first one ever on the Moon."
"It cost enough," said Mrs. Anderson, with a small sigh. "Maintaining Robutt isn't cheap, either," said Mr. Anderson.
Jimmy was out on the crater, as his mother had said. By Earth standards, he was spindly, but rather tall for a 10-year-old. His arms and legs were long and agile. He looked thicker and stubbier with his spacesuit on, but he could handle the lunar gravity as no Earth-born human being could. His father couldn't begin to keep up with him when Jimmy stretched his legs and went into the kangaroo hop.
The outer side of the crater sloped southward and the Earth, which was low in the southern sky (where it always was, as seen from Lunar City) was nearly full, so that the entire