Plot summary
Noel Meyerhof is a "Grand Master", one of a small cadre of Earth's recognised geniuses, who has the insight to know what questions to ask Multivac. But a computer scientist is concerned that Meyerhof is acting erratically. As a known joke-teller, he has been discovered feeding jokes and riddles into Multivac.
By computer analysis, the characters in the story investigate the origin of humour, particularly why there seems to be no such thing as an original joke, except for puns. Every normal joke is something that was originally heard from someone else.
The computer eventually tells them that humour is actually a psychological study tool imposed on the human race by extraterrestrials studying mankind, similarly to how humans study mice. They needed to isolate the responses to their jokes from original ones, so they "programmed" us to react differently to puns.
The characters of the story conjecture that figuring this fact out makes humour useless as a tool, so the aliens will cease using it... And suddenly the characters of the story feel that they cannot recall any joke.
I, Robot is a fixup collection made up of science fiction short stories by American writer Isaac Asimov. The stories originally appeared in the American magazines Super Science Stories and Astounding Science Fiction between 1940 and 1950 and were then compiled into a single publication by Gnome Press in 1950, in an initial edition of 5,000 copies.
The Foundation series is a science fiction book series written by American author Isaac Asimov. First published as a series of short stories and novellas in 1942–50, and subsequently in three books in 1951–53, for nearly thirty years the series was widely known as The Foundation Trilogy: Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953). It won the one-time Hugo Award for "Best All-Time Series" in 1966. Asimov later added new volumes, with two sequels, Foundation's Edge (1982) and Foundation and Earth (1986), and two prequels, Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1993).
The Three Laws of Robotics are a set of rules devised by science fiction author Isaac Asimov, which were to be followed by robots in several of his stories. The rules were introduced in his 1942 short story "Runaround", although similar restrictions had been implied in earlier stories.
Earth Is Room Enough is a collection of fifteen short science fiction and fantasy stories and two pieces of comic verse by American writer Isaac Asimov, published in 1957. In his autobiography In Joy Still Felt, Asimov wrote, "I was still thinking of the remarks of reviewers such as George O. Smith... concerning my penchant for wandering over the Galaxy. I therefore picked stories that took place on Earth and called the book Earth Is Room Enough." The collection includes one story from the Robot series and four stories that feature or mention the fictional computer Multivac.
The Complete Robot (1982) is a collection of 31 of the 37 science fiction short stories about robots by American writer Isaac Asimov, written between 1939 and 1977. Most of the stories had been previously collected in the books I, Robot and The Rest of the Robots, while four had previously been uncollected and the rest had been scattered across five other anthologies. They share a theme of the interaction of humans, robots and morality, and put together tell a larger story of Asimov's fictional history of robotics. The stories are grouped into categories.
Robot Dreams (1986) is a collection of science fiction short stories by American writer Isaac Asimov, illustrated by Ralph McQuarrie. The title story is about Susan Calvin's discovery of a robot with rather disturbing dreams. It was written specifically for this volume and inspired by the McQuarrie cover illustration. All of the other stories had previously appeared in various other Asimov collections. Four of the stories are robot stories, while five are Multivac stories.
"The Evitable Conflict" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the June 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and subsequently appeared in the collections I, Robot (1950), The Complete Robot (1982), and Robot Visions (1990). It features the character Stephen Byerley from the earlier "Evidence".
"The Last Question" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly and in the anthologies in the collections Nine Tomorrows (1959), The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973), Robot Dreams (1986), The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (1986), the retrospective Opus 100 (1969), and in Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, Vol. 1 (1990). While he also considered it one of his best works, "The Last Question" was Asimov's favorite short story of his own authorship, and is one of a loosely connected series of stories concerning a fictional computer called Multivac. Through successive generations, humanity questions Multivac on the subject of entropy.
The Best of Isaac Asimov is a collection of twelve science fiction short stories by American writer Isaac Asimov, published by Sphere in 1973. It begins with a short introduction giving various details on the stories, such as how they came to be written, or what significance merits their inclusion in a "best of" collection, as well as some of Dr. Asimov's thoughts on a best of collection itself. The stories included are two of his early works, two of his late works (post-1960), and eight from the 1950s, which he refers to as his "golden decade" in the introduction. Except for the last story in the book, "Mirror Image", none of the stories are related to his Robot and Foundation series, while a few mention the Multivac computer.
Multivac is a fictional supercomputer appearing in over a dozen science fiction stories by American writer Isaac Asimov. Asimov's depiction of Multivac, a mainframe computer accessible by terminal, originally by specialists using machine code and later by any user, and used for directing the global economy and humanity's development, has been seen as the defining conceptualization of the genre of computers for the period (1950s–1960s). Multivac has been described as the direct ancestor of HAL 9000.
"All the Troubles of the World" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. The story first appeared in the April 1958 issue of Super-Science Fiction, and was reprinted in the 1959 collection Nine Tomorrows. It is one of a loosely connected series of stories by Asimov concerning the fictional supercomputer Multivac. The story was adapted into a short movie in 1978.
A feghoot is a humorous short story or vignette ending in a pun, where the story contains sufficient context to recognize the punning humor.
Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor is a humour book written by Isaac Asimov consisting of and subtitled as "A lifetime collection of favorite jokes, anecdotes, and limericks with copious notes on how to tell them and why".
"Franchise" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the August 1955 issue of the magazine If: Worlds of Science Fiction, and was reprinted in the collections Earth Is Room Enough (1957) and Robot Dreams (1986). It is one of a loosely connected series of stories concerning a fictional computer called Multivac. It is the first story in which Asimov dealt with computers as computers and not as immobile robots.
"The Machine That Won the War" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. The story first appeared in the October 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and was reprinted in the collections Nightfall and Other Stories (1969) and Robot Dreams (1986). It was also printed in a contemporary edition of Reader's Digest, illustrated. It is one of a loosely connected series of such stories concerning a fictional supercomputer called Multivac.
"The Life and Times of Multivac" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. The story first appeared in the 5 January 1975 issue of The New York Times Magazine, and was reprinted in the collections The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories and The Best of Creative Computing in 1976. It is one of a loosely connected series of stories concerning a fictional supercomputer called Multivac. "The Life and Times of Multivac" was the first piece of fiction ever commissioned and published by The New York Times.
Sucker Bait is a science fiction novella by American writer Isaac Asimov. It was first serialized in the February and March 1954 issues of Astounding Science Fiction, and reprinted in the 1955 collection The Martian Way and Other Stories. It has also been adapted as an episode of the BBC anthology television series Out of the Unknown.
Science Fiction by Asimov is a collection of six short stories and one poem by American author Isaac Asimov. Published by Davis Publications in 1986, it was given away free to subscribers of Asimov's SF Magazine.
AI takeover—the idea that some kind of artificial intelligence may supplant humankind as the dominant intelligent species on the planet—is a common theme in science fiction. Famous cultural touchstones include Terminator and The Matrix.
Depending on the counting convention used, and including all titles, charts, and edited collections, there may be currently over 500 books in Isaac Asimov's bibliography—as well as his individual short stories, individual essays, and criticism. For his 100th, 200th, and 300th books, Asimov published Opus 100 (1969), Opus 200 (1979), and Opus 300 (1984), celebrating his writing.
