Plot summary
Anthony Smith and William Anti-Aut are full brothers who live in a "Post-Catastrophe" world where, due to concerns about humanity's limited genetic diversity, siblings who share both parents are rare (and identical twins are nonexistent). Not only are they full brothers, they also look alike, which is totally unheard of, not to mention embarrassing.
William pursues a career in genetic engineering, referred to as homology, and has been trying to understand and cure autism, hence his chosen surname. Anthony has gone into telemetrics, and is working on the Mercury Project, the purpose of which is to send a robot to Mercury. This is a problem because the positronic brain at the time is not yet adapted to such an environment, so a computer on Earth must direct the robot. However, the speed of light communications lag between Earth and Mercury can last up to twenty-two minutes, making computer control difficult. Anthony attempts to solve this problem by recruiting a homologist that can design a positronic brain that resembles a human brain. The leading homologist in this area is his brother William, and much to their mutual embarrassment, the two wind up working together.
William struggles to help form the brain, but when the robot is tested in Arizona, it is terribly clumsy. Anthony sees no hope in the robot, but William argues that it was designed for the environment of Mercury, not Arizona. When the robot is sent to Mercury, it operates smoothly, and the project is a success. The solution, William realized, was to use an autistic human rather than a computer to direct the robot. The story ends with William and Anthony befriending each other after being so long separated.
Terraforming or terraformation is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying the atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology of a planet, moon, or other body to be similar to the environment of Earth to make it habitable by Earth-like life.
The Robot series is a series of 37 science fiction short stories and six novels by American writer Isaac Asimov, featuring positronic robots.
The Three Laws of Robotics are a set of rules devised by science fiction author Isaac Asimov. The rules were introduced in his 1942 short story "Runaround", although they had been foreshadowed in some earlier stories. The Three Laws, quoted from the "Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D.", are:
A positronic brain is a fictional technological device, originally conceived by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. It functions as a central processing unit (CPU) for robots, and, in some unspecified way, provides them with a form of consciousness recognizable to humans. When Asimov wrote his first robot stories in 1939 and 1940, the positron was a newly discovered particle, and so the buzz word "positronic" added a scientific connotation to the concept. Asimov's 1942 short story "Runaround" elaborates his fictional Three Laws of Robotics, which are ingrained in the positronic brains of nearly all of his robots. Positronic brains, as such, are a kind of brain made of positrons – small particles which help in the transmission of various thoughts and impulses to the brain and help the brain's cognition relay the selected emotion or solution.
Robots and Empire is a science fiction novel by the American author Isaac Asimov, published by Doubleday Books in 1985. It is part of Asimov's Robot series, which consists of many short stories and five novels.
"The Bicentennial Man" is a novelette in the Robot series by American writer Isaac Asimov. It was awarded the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award for best science fiction novelette of 1976.
The Naked Sun is a science fiction novel by American writer Isaac Asimov, the second in his Robot series. Like its predecessor, The Caves of Steel, this is a whodunit story. It was first published in book form in 1957 after being serialized in Astounding Science Fiction between October and December 1956.
The Positronic Man is a 1992 novel by American writers Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg, based on Asimov's novelette "The Bicentennial Man".
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.
"Escape!" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It was first published as "Paradoxical Escape" in the August 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and reprinted as "Escape!" in the collections I, Robot (1950) and The Complete Robot (1982).
See also: Isaac Asimov bibliography (categorical), Isaac Asimov bibliography (chronological)
Inconstant Moon is a science fiction short story collection by American author Larry Niven that was published in 1973. "Inconstant Moon" is also a 1971 short story that is included in the collection. The title refers to "O, swear not by the moon, th' inconstant moon", a quote from the balcony scene in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The collection was assembled from the US collections The Shape of Space and All the Myriad Ways.
"Risk" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov, first published in the May 1955 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, and reprinted in the collections The Rest of the Robots (1964) and The Complete Robot (1982).
Mind uploading, whole brain emulation, or substrate-independent minds is a use of a computer or another substrate as an emulated human brain. The term "mind transfer" also refers to a hypothetical transfer of a mind from one biological brain to another. Uploaded minds and societies of minds, often in simulated realities, are recurring themes in science-fiction novels and films since the 1950s.
"Robot Dreams" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov exploring the unbalance of robot/human relationships under Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. It was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1987. It won the Locus Award for Best Short Story in 1987. "Robot Dreams", along with 20 other short stories by Asimov, was published in Robot Dreams in 1986 by Berkley Books.
The following outline provides an overview of and a topical guide to transhumanism, an international intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical and psychological capacities. Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging and hypothetical technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations as well as study the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies. They predict that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings with such greatly expanded abilities as to merit the label posthuman.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to artificial intelligence:
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to robotics:
In a writing career spanning 53 years (1939–1992), science fiction and popular science author Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) wrote and published 40 novels, 383 short stories, over 280 non-fiction books, and edited about 147 others.
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