The Portrayal of Robots in Isaak Asimov’s Runaround and other Stories-An Evaluation

Abstract

Isack Asimov’s robot stories made a significant impact on how science fiction portrays robots, as he consistently depicted them as altogether something else than monsters. In hindsight, while Asimov readily took credit for such innovativeness, he also noted that the stories were a simple reaction against the “Robot-as-Menace” type of story, referring the less frequent variety of “Robot-as-Pathos” stories where the robot was a “lovable” creature “usually put upon by cruel human beings”.On the other hand, the Three Laws also provide Asimov the guidelines for creating plots and help readers solve his puzzle stories. His short story, Runaround is explicitly about the Three Laws and how they cause a standstill situation, which can be solved only by the engineers’ capacity to test hypotheses and find the solution by exploiting the Laws.