Last week’s blog post about cyborgs got me to thinking about Isaac Asimov. I got to thinking about Asimov because Leilane Nishime says in her article that most cyborgs in fiction fall into one of two groups: they’re either dangerous machines that want to kill us all, or they’re tragic figures that try desperately to stay in touch with their human side. Very few cyborgs in fiction embrace their cyborginess and do something different with it.
Well, over two decades before Nishime’s article was published, Isaac Asimov had almost the exact same thing to say about robots. The following is an excerpt from The Complete Robot, an anthology of his robot stories that was published in 1982: