I, Robot

Gnome Press compiled the science fiction short stories in I, Robot, by the American writer Isaac Asimov, into one collection in 1950, in a first printing of 5,000 copies. The stories originally appeared in magazines between 1940 and 1950, and all of them except the framing story were later included in The Complete Robot. The book is presented as a fictional history of robotics, assembled from the recollections of a robopsychologist.

Dr Susan Calvin is the robopsychologist at U.S. Robots, and a reporter is given access to her so that she can recount the cases which taught the company what its machines would do. Every robot is built around three laws, in order: do not injure a human, obey orders unless they conflict with that, and protect your own existence unless that conflicts with the other two. The laws are simple, and what the robots do with them is not.

A mind-reading robot refuses to tell the truth, a telepathic machine develops opinions about humanity's future, and one robot goes missing in a way nobody can explain. Asimov wrote the stories so that each one works as a puzzle about how the laws behave in an unusual case, and the solutions are usually found by Calvin or by the company's field testers. The collection is the source of the phrase 'Three Laws of Robotics'.

The stories were written over a decade and revised for the collection, so the technology and the tone vary between them. The book is a standalone collection, and Asimov later connected it to his other robot novels and to the Foundation series in a shared future history.