ASIMOV! by Robert SilverbergScience fiction has given the world a legion of baaaad robots over the years. Back in the Gernsbackian antiquity of our genre, killer-robot stories were a pulp staple. Abner J. Gelula's “Automaton” of 1931 portrayed a lustful robot that makes erotic overtures to its creator's daughter and has to be destroyed. ("With an unusual alacrity, the Iron Man reached out its powerful appendages and held both Martin and the girl in vise-like grips against its metal body.") In Harl Vincent's “Rex” (1934), a robot seeks to take over the world. ("Reason told him that the first step to that end must be to take control of mankind and its purposeless affairs. He set the workshop humming in the construction of eleven super-robots, one to be sent to each of the North American cities to organize the lesser robots and take control of the government.")Though Isaac Asimov's robots were supposedly designed to be harmless, there's a dangerously disobedient one in his “Little Lost Robot”
What do You think about Asimov's SF, September 2010?
