Minds of Steel: Imagination and Detection in Isaac Asimov's Robot Novels and Short Stories

Abstract

Isaac Asimov has been singled out by SF scholars as the author who legitimized the SF mystery subgenre, which typically unfolds a detective fiction plot in an SF context. Nowhere is this hybridizing tendency more evident than in the Robot series, comprised of four full-length novels and several short stories. This thesis argues that Asimov’s pairing of SF and mystery reflects the typical dialectical movement displayed in all his fiction, which proceeds by setting up oppositions between apparently antithetical terms (past/future, logic/intuition, human/robot) which are eventually shown to reach a synthesis. After a section that traces the genesis and evolution of the Asimovian robot, the following chapters focus each on one of these thematic pairs, and demonstrate how Asimov’s robot fiction engages with the theory of SF, the history of detective fiction, and branches of science such as cybernetics. This analysis ultimately reveals that the variety of the Robot stories serves not to invite an evaluative comparison between humans and robots, but rather to explore as extensively as possible Asimov’s underlying preoccupation with the workings of intelligence, be it human or robotic.