-- [ From: David Christenson * EMC.Ver #2.5.3 ] --
Maybe an old thread already, but I thought I'd toss in a bibliographical
note about Asimov's Calvin character.
As near as I can figure from internal evidence in my Asimov paperbacks,
the first Calvin story was "Liar!," first published in 1941. In this
tale, the "Liar!" was a mind-reading robot who lied to Calvin about her
prospects for romance with a colleague to spare her feelings ("a robot
may not injure a human being..."). Calvin set out to destroy the robot
Captain Kirk style, by talking it into suicide via one of those HAL
contradictions.
In "Eight Stories from the Rest of the Robots," the latest date on a
Calvin story is 1958. This is "Lenny," which ends with Calvin teaching a
robot to call to her: " 'Mommie, I want you...' And the footsteps of
Susan Calvin could be heard hurrying eagerly across the laboratory floor
toward the only kind of baby she could ever have or love."
BTW, I love SF from this period, but I don't quite go along with the
sentiment that excuses stereotyping in the Golden Age, because I don't
accept the popular idea that the 1950s was a uniculture. After all, de
Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" was published in English by 1953, and by the
time Susan Calvin had hurried after her surrogate baby, Doris Lessing
had published four novels, the Civil Rights Movement was well underway
in the south, and even French and Italian women had the right to vote
for over a decade.
-- David Christenson - ldqt79a@prodigy.comRay Goulding: "Suppose someone on the radio said, "What are you doing now, in this Atomic Age?'" Bob Elliott: "And you would answer, 'No.'"
"You'll say reality is under no obligation to be interesting. To which I'd reply that reality may disregard the obligation but that we may not. " - Jorge Luis Borges
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