I thought I’d write a somewhat more speculative article this week (with more potential for controversy, I suppose) about one of my favorite authors–Isaac Asimov. In particular, I’d like to look at whether the good Doctor might have gone one step beyond his acknowledged battle against the “Frankenstein Complex” in some of his writings.

Asimov’s considerable angst over the Frankenstein Complex (a term he is widely acknowledged to have coined) is well documented both in his stories (where Susan Calvin and the rest of the US Robots and Mechanical Men team frequently rail against it) and in his essays (e.g., “Machine and Robot” in Robot Visions, which is a nice sampling of Asimov’s robot stories and his non-fiction writings on the topic). Most sci-fi aficionados know that the “Three Laws of Robotics” were his literary creation designed to counter that complex. I won’t expound on them here other than to say they were his reactive response, a basis for allaying fears of robots. What is more interesting to me was what seems a more pro-active sub theme that I’ve never specifically seen addressed before–that he actually made his robots god-like.
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