I, Robot

Introduction

I was suckled on the Asimov Robots books, taken down off my father’s bookshelf and enjoyed again and again. I read dozens of Asimov novels, and my writing career began in earnest when I started to sell stories to Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, which I had read for so long as I’d had the pocket money to buy it on the stands.

When Wired Magazine asked me to interview the director of the film I, Robot, I went back and re-read that old canon. I was struck immediately by one of the thin places in Asimov’s world-building: how could you have a society where only one company was allowed to make only one kind of robot?

Exploring this theme turned out to be a hoot. I worked in some of Orwell’s most recognizable furniture from 1984, and set the action in my childhood home in suburban Toronto, 55 Picola Court. The main character’s daughter is named for my god-daughter, Ada Trouble Norton. I had a blast working in the vernacular of the old-time futurism of Asimov and Heinlein, calling toothpaste “dentifrice” and sneaking in references to “the search engine.”

My “I, Robot” is an allegory about digital rights management technology, of course. This is the stuff that nominally stops us from infringing copyright (yeah, right, how’s that working out for you, Mr Entertainment Exec?) and turns our computers into something that controls us, rather than enabling us.

This story was written at a writer’s workshop on Toronto Island, at the Gibraltar Point center, and was immeasurably improved by my friend Pat York, herself a talented writer who died later that year in a car wreck. Not a day goes by that I don’t miss Pat. This story definitely owes its strength to Pat, and it’s a tribute to her that it won the 2005 Locus Award and was a finalist for the Hugo and British Science Fiction Award in the same year.