Robot Dreams

Then, too, sometimes when I saw accurately, or when I saw something that might well prove to be accurate some day, then I generally placed it far too far into the future. I admit I got the robots correct, for my earliest stories indicated that they got their start in the 1980s and 1990s, which is not bad at all.

However, what of the computerized cars in "Sally" and of the pocket computers in "The Feeling of Power"? I was careful not to give the exact dates of discovery of these advances. (I may be dumb, but I’m not that dumb.) Still, there’s no doubt as we read the stories that they are discoveries of the far future  –  yet they’re here now and I have lived to see them, and be embarrassed over my lack of confidence in the human mind and human ingenuity.

"Breeds There a Man…?" deals, in part, with the development of an advance against the nuclear bomb. It was published in 1951 and, although I don’t date it, the impression it gives is that its events take place in the near future, perhaps just a few years after 1951.

I was clearly wrong in this, for real discussions of possible defenses didn’t come till the 1980s.

What’s more, my notion of a defense was a purely static one  –  the creation of a force-field shield strong enough to resist even a nuclear explosion (the story was written before the H-Bomb was invented, by the way). Now that we are considering a nuclear defense, we are talking of an active one. We are talking of the use of computerized X-ray lasers, designed to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles as soon as they are launched and move beyond the atmosphere. Frankly, I don’t think this will work either, but it is considerably more advanced than my own foolish speculation of the matter in 1951, thirty-five years ago.

Generally, I can do my best foreseeing once I’m given a hint (a good strong hint). In my robot stories, I postulated robots that were so huge that they were immobile and that could do nothing but think and communicate the results of those thoughts. I had one like that in my very first robot story. In later robot stories I called them "brains." I didn’t think to call them computers.

My robots, too, had "brains" that made them work, and I never spoke of them as computers, either. I had to make them science-fictionish, of course, so I called them "positronic brains." Positrons had been detected for the first time only four years before my first robot story had been written.

Positrons were exciting particles, bringing with them visions of "antimatter." For that reason, I thought positronic brains was a phrase that sounded good. They would not be essentially different from electronic brains, except that positrons could be made to come into being and would then be destroyed in a millionth of a second or so by all the electrons that surround them, no matter where on Earth they were. That gave me the notion that they might be seen as responsible for the rapidity of thought. To be sure, the energy relationships  –  the energy required to produce positrons in quantity or the energy released when positrons are destroyed in quantity  –  are horrendous, so great that the notion of positronic brains is forever impossible, in all likelihood  –  but I ignored that.

It wasn’t until after computers were invented and the public was made aware of their existence, that computers began to exist in my stories, and even then I didn’t truly conceive of the possibility of miniaturization. Yes, I spoke of rocket computers but I visualized them as scarcely more powerful than a slide rule.

But eventually I did grasp miniaturization  –  naturally, after the process had started. In "The Last Question" I began with my usual computer, Multivac, as large as a city, for I could only conceive a larger computer by imagining more and more vacuum tubes heaved into it. But then, in that story, I began miniaturizing and miniaturizing far beyond what I think there is any real possibility of.

However, I suspect the readers are always ready to forgive a poor science fiction writer getting to be out-of-date. As I said, my "Lucky Starr" books were not hurt for being out-of-date. As a matter.of fact, H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds is still read avidly, nearly a century after it was published and despite the incredibly false picture of Mars that it represents (false in the light of the Mars we know today). The pictures of Mars given by Edgar Rice Burroughs, a generation after Wells, and by Ray Bradbury even as late as the 1950s, are also in no way comparable to the real thing, and yet that doesn’t make it impossible to read A Princess on Mars or The Martian Chronicles, either.

That is because there is more to a science fiction story than the science it contains. There is also the story and if the science it contains is bent because of later discoveries, or because the plot absolutely demands the bending, we tend to forgive and overlook.

For instance, in my story "The Billiard Ball" I have a billiard ball enter a region of space in which it instantly assumes the speed of light. This is undoubtedly impossible, but even in terms of my bending of science, there is something more impossible. The billiard ball has a finite volume. Part of it enters the region first and that part instantly assumes the speed of light and breaks away from the rest. In short, the billiard ball must be reduced to atoms, or objects even less substantial, yet in the story it retains its integrity. My Conscience hurt me, but I just let it hurt and did what I had to do.

In "The Ugly Little Boy," I have a version of time travel and I firmly believe that time travel is impossible. However, I ignored that because the story is only tangentially about time travel. What it is really about is love.

Again I doubt that human beings will ever become living energy vortexes, though I present them as such in "Eyes Do More Than See," Who cares? The story is really about the beauty of material things.