With the release of I Robot in 2004, we once again had an opportunity to see Isaac Asimov’s vision of a world of robots come to life. His last film was the excellent Bicentennial Man, which did poorly at the box office. I Robot seems to have done better, largely because of the presence of Will Smith, who was one of the film’s producers, and a whole lot more action. But is I Robot truly an Asimovian film? More particularly, is it an Asimovian Science Fiction mystery?
Isaac Asimov has many claims to fame. One of the best known Science Fiction writers ever, he is the author of the famous Foundation series, the Robot series and the story “Nightfall”. If that weren’t enough, he wrote hundreds of books, many not Science Fiction. He wrote a mystery novel, juvenile non-fiction, adult non-fiction, hard science and even a junior Science Fiction series, Lucky Starr.
But in 1953, Asimov did something nobody had done before. He wrote the first true Science Fiction Mystery. “One would think that Science Fiction would blend easily with the mystery. Science itself is so nearly a Mystery and the research scientist so nearly a Sherlock Holmes…R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke is an example of a well-known and successful (fictional) scientist-detective.” Despite this no one had done it well before Asimov.
If you’d like to read the rest, please check out Monster 2: From the Pages of Dark Worlds Quarterly.