A Question of Responsibility

In 1940, a 20-year-old science fiction fan from Brooklyn found that he was growing tired of stories that endlessly repeated the myths of Frankenstein and Faust: Robots were created and destroyed their creator; robots were created and destroyed their creator-ad nauseum. So he began writing robot stories of his own. "[They were] robot stories of a new variety," he recalls. The young writer's name, of course, was Isaac Asimov (1964), and the robot stories he began writing that year have become classics of science fiction, the standards by which others are judged.