One by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain.
I am a creature of dreams as well as of reason.
Saying something is ‘too bad’ is easy. You say you disapprove, which makes you a nice person, and then you can go about your own business and not be interested anymore.
If it’s the product of nonhuman minds and hands, what may seem primitive may, in actual fact, be merely nonhuman.
He was thirty-two. Not old – but he felt old. His body, whatever its mutant mental powers, was physically weak. Every star! Every star he could see – and every star he couldn’t see. It must all be his! Revenge on all. On a humanity of which he wasn’t a part. On a Galaxy in which he didn’t fit.
The human mind resents control.
It is my belief that throughout the history of the positronic robot, the First Law of Robotics has been deliberately misquoted.
They brought the plan through, because they loved the greater Plan.
The same pattern of the creation by supernatural gods of an ordered Universe out of Chaos occurs over and over again in various mythologies, and in a sense, that is the only story possible.
And of those who were aware, there were dime classes. First, there were the many who knew little and were very confident.
In fact, no one noticed that the Empire had lost its drive, its forward look, because Trantor gleamed in shining metal.
Bliss approached him slowly, placed her hand on his shoulder. “Pel, I – I think well of you.” Pelorat looked away. “It’s all right, Bliss. You needn’t be kind.” “I’m not being kind, Pel. I think – very well of you.
There can be no serious conflicts on Earth, in which one group or another can seize more power than it has for what it thinks is its own good despite the harm to Mankind as a whole, while the Machines rule.
Men who feel themselves strong enough to decide for themselves what is best for themselves, and not just to be told what is best for others.
Humanity today forms a single species and can interbreed freely. Differences in color of hair, skin and eyes are largely due to differences in the quantity of a pigment called melanin, and this does not affect humanity’s essentially unitary character. Nor do differences in the shape of the eye or nose, in the shape of the skull, or in height.
Oddity is in the mind of the receiver.
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.
I have always found in my own work – quite different from yours, of course, but possibly we may generalize – that zeroing in tightly on a particular problem is self-defeating. Why not relax and talk about something else, and your unconscious mind – not laboring under the weight of concentrated thought – may solve the problem for you.
Are you well, sir?” asked Giskard. It was a foolish question, dictated by the programming of the robot, thought Baley, though, at that, it was no worse than the questions asked by human beings, sometimes with wild inappropriateness, out of the programming of etiquette.
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.