The attack on Thomas and the free ride for Clinton by these women’s groups seems like sheer cynicism, until we remember that we are living inside a perverse version of Star Wars. From that perspective, we see that actions take on moral value solely depending on which side of the larger conflict one is on. Any deed performed by a person perceived as being in the Rebel camp (i.e., Clinton) is to be condoned (she trapped him! She’s a bimbo anyway! You can’t take her word for it!), while any person who serves the Empire is presumed guilty (she wouldn’t have accused him if he hadn’t done something! Believe the victim!). There is no attempt at consistency or fairness, no rule of law, only of power.

  And judging by the opinion polls that showed Clinton’s popularity reaching an all-time high in the aftermath of the White House intern scandal, one can only conclude that the majority of the American people subscribe to the same idea. The economy is healthy and we’re not actually at war, therefore Clinton must be doing a good job (never mind that it’s the chairman of the Federal Reserve who actually presides over the economy, and blind luck that has kept us at peace for six years); therefore he is Good and those who attack him must be Bad. More to the point, he is still perceived as the head of the Rebel cause, while those who accuse him are treated by his supporters and by the press at large as tools of an Imperial conspiracy.

  But it’s not just the Left that lives in this twisted version of Star Wars. The same spectacle can be seen in other contexts, as the new Republican Congress elected in 1994 showed. What was the Republican response to the bombing in Oklahoma City, on the anniversary of the Waco disaster, by people linked to gun-totin’ militia groups? Did they crack down on groups that unlawfully assemble under arms with the open aim of flouting or even taking over government authority? Of course not! Those are Rebels, don’t you know. The Republican response was to attack the FBI and the ATF in a series of congressional hearings, and to attempt to repeal the ban on assault weapons! Many of us looked on in astonishment at this mad tea party, until we remembered that, yes, this is the Star Wars moral universe, and Gingrich’s group was holding a revolution. They were the Rebels now, and so it was their job to strike at the evil Empire. Rebel assault weapons: Good. Imperial storm troopers: Bad.

  In a world where only Rebels can be good guys and any attempt to maintain decent order is Imperial and inhuman, we can hardly be surprised to find civilization sliding along the sloping deck of the Titanic while the orchestra plays on.

  George Lucas hardly created the moral worldview we live in now, but because his vision was so clear and powerful, Star Wars provided what all new religions must have: a scripture that makes the moral worldview clear and compelling, and carries it vividly into the hearts of the believers. Star Wars, therefore, has become religious literature, affirming the faith of true believers in the Crips vs. Bloods, us vs. them moral worldview of the modern audience. Even those intellectual sophisticates who sneer at all science fiction are very likely to subscribe to exactly that our-team-is-the-only-good-team worldview. Ah, but it’s grand to be on the side of Truth and Justice, especially when we never have to explore exactly what is true and who is just. Everybody’s in uniform.

  But maybe this is how it always is, perhaps how it has to be. The great popular stories affirm the simplest kind of faith; but those who are not satisfied with such a thin gruel will search out the more difficult but ultimately satisfying tales. And if science fiction’s most prominent stories are interpreted in ways that are deeply dumb, this does not erase the fact that science fiction also includes the deepest of fictions as well. One thing is certain: for a religious vision, whether complex or simple, it is to science fiction that the public must turn. Like it or not, that’s the enterprise we makers of science fiction are engaged in.

  In my opinion, that’s what gives science fiction, unlike such genres as romance fiction and thrillers, the possibility of greatness, of value beyond momentary entertainment. And that is why, eight years after selecting these stories, I find that not one of them is ephemeral, but all have the power to change the soul of the open-minded reader.

  I have not selected these stories, however, because I approve of the particular moral worldview they explore; often I do, but often I do not. I have selected them because they matter, because they must be taken into account. You will discover for yourself which stories have answers that ring true for you, and which do not. If we who tell these tales are sometimes blind, have patience with us. We have stepped from the cave and now stand blinking in the light. We may not understand all we see, but we’re trying to keep our eyes open.

  Introduction to “Robot Dreams”

  by Isaac Asimov

  I’ve already written a lot about Isaac Asimov: how I think him the supreme practitioner of the American tradition of plain style. How I find his work, though he was an avowed atheist, some of the most deeply religious writing I’ve read. How, unlike many other writers, he seemed only to get better (and wiser) as he got older. Those essays were printed elsewhere; they’re still true, in my opinion.

  Asimov is dead now; his string of great science fiction writing has ended. A few books are being written in his name, continuing some of his stories, but those aren’t Asimov novels anymore. None of us can match the brilliant clarity of his writing, and none of us will ever be able to approach issues and stories from his viewpoint, with his insights and wisdom.

  Nowhere is Asimov more clearly revealed than in the story you’re about to read. “Robot Dreams” is a morally recursive dilemma, forcing us to face the limits of tolerance and liberality even as we yearn to erase those limits. Asimov was often accused of not creating characters (a charge he tacitly accepted in an essay he wrote called “The Little Tin God of Characterization”) but the charge was never true. There are characters here, powerful ones; great heroes, in fact, carrying the futures of species within them in their majesty. It’s just that, like his style, Asimov’s characterizations are so subtle that you aren’t aware of them. He slips them into our memories unnoticed. But that’s when they have the power to change us.

  I met Asimov only twice, once merely to shake hands and say hi, the second time for a little longer. It was the Nebula banquet where he was given his Grandmaster Award and I received something or other—and I honestly don’t remember what—but we stood side by side as they snapped pictures of us. With his typical modesty (the boasting was a public persona) he pointed to my Nebula and said, “That’s the real award. This one”—his Grandmaster Award—“they gave me for not being dead yet.”

  I couldn’t let that statement go unchallenged. I tried to tell him how wrong he was, what a giant he was, how we all learned from him, how—but he didn’t want to hear it. I was embarrassing him. I stopped talking. It didn’t matter: He either knew what he had accomplished, or he never would, certainly not from my babbling.

  And later, I was invited to contribute a story to a Festschrift anthology in Asimov’s honor. He had opened his fictional worlds to us. I was able to write a Foundation story. So I wrote about a brilliant old man who doubted the worth of his contribution to humanity, and received valediction when he least expected it. I wrote my judgment of Asimov, and my feelings about him, and set the story within his Foundation universe, at the very center, in the library on Trantor. I took one of Asimov’s favorite themes, the need for scientists and scholars to break down boundaries between disciplines, and made it the heart of how the library worked. Every word was written to him.

  And he never read it. I should have known. Word came back to me that Asimov simply wasn’t reading any of the stories. Why? Because, with typical modesty, he was sure that we would have written Foundation and Robot stories that were better than his, and having read our work, he wouldn’t be able to find the heart to continue with his own.

  So…he never got my letter.

  I can only hope he’s not too stubborn to read it now.

  ROBOT DREAMS

  Isaac Asimov

  “Last night I dreamed,” said LVX-1, calmly.

  Susan Calvin said nothing, but her lined face, old with wisdom and experience, seemed to undergo a microscopic twitch.

  “Did you hear that?” said Linda Rash, nervously. “It’s as I told you.” She was small, dark-haired, and young. Her right hand opened and closed, over and over.

  Calvin nodded. She said, quietly, “Elvex, you will not move nor speak nor hear us until I say your name again.”

  There was no answer. The robot sat as though it were cast out of one piece of metal, and it would stay so until it heard its name again.

  Calvin said, “What is your computer entry code, Dr. Rash? Or enter it yourself if that will make you more comfortable. I want to inspect the positronic brain pattern.”

  Linda’s hands fumbled, for a moment, at the keys. She broke the process and started again. The fine pattern appeared on the screen.

  Calvin said, “Your permission, please, to manipulate your computer.”

  Permission was granted with a speechless nod. Of course! What could Linda, a new and unproven robopsychologist, do against the Living Legend?

  Slowly, Susan Calvin studied the screen, moving it across and down, then up, then suddenly throwing in a key-combination so rapidly that Linda didn’t see what had been done, but the pattern displayed a new portion of itself altogether and had been enlarged. Back and forth she went, her gnarled fingers tripping over the keys.

  No change came over the old face. As though vast calculations were going through her head, she watched all the pattern shifts.

  Linda wondered. It was impossible to analyze a pattern without at least a hand-held computer, yet the Old Woman simply stared. Did she have a computer implanted in her skull? Or was it her brain which, for decades, had done nothing but devise, study, and analyze the positronic brain patterns? Did she grasp such a pattern the way Mozart grasped the notation of a symphony?

  Finally Calvin said, “What is it you have done, Rash?”

  Linda said, a little abashed, “I made use of fractal geometry.”

  “I gathered that. But why?”

  “It had never been done. I thought it would produce a brain pattern with added complexity, possibly closer to that of the human.”

  “Was anyone consulted? Was this all on your own?”

  “I did not consult. It was on my own.”

  Calvin’s faded eyes looked long at the young woman. “You had no right. Rash your name; rash your nature. Who are you not to ask? I myself, I, Susan Calvin, would have discussed this.”

  “I was afraid I would be stopped.”

  “You certainly would have been.”

  “Am I,” her voice caught, even as she strove to hold it firm, “going to be fired?”

  “Quite possibly,” said Calvin. “Or you might be promoted. It depends on what I think when I am through.”

  “Are you going to dismantle El—” She had almost said the name, which would have reactivated the robot and been one more mistake. She could not afford another mistake, if it wasn’t already too late to afford anything at all. “Are you going to dismantle the robot?”

  She was suddenly aware, with some shock, that the Old Woman had an electron gun in the pocket of her smock. Dr. Calvin had come prepared for just that.

  “We’ll see,” said Calvin. “The robot may prove too valuable to dismantle.”

  “But how can it dream?”

  “You’ve made a positronic brain pattern remarkably like that of a human brain. Human brains must dream to reorganize, to get rid, periodically, of knots and snarls. Perhaps so must this robot, and for the same reason. Have you asked him what he has dreamed?”

  “No, I sent for you as soon as he said he had dreamed. I would deal with this matter no further on my own, after that.”

  “Ah!” A very small smile passed over Calvin’s face. “There are limits beyond which your folly will not carry you. I am glad of that. In fact, I am relieved. And now let us together see what we can find out.”

  She said, sharply, “Elvex.”

  The robot’s head turned toward her smoothly. “Yes, Dr. Calvin?”

  “How do you know you have dreamed?”

  “It is at night, when it is dark, Dr. Calvin,” said Elvex, “and there is suddenly light, although I can see no cause for the appearance of light. I see things that have no connection with what I conceive of as reality. I hear things. I react oddly. In searching my vocabulary for words to express what was happening, I came across the word ‘dream.’ Studying its meaning I finally came to the conclusion I was dreaming.”

  “How did you come to have ‘dream’ in your vocabulary, I wonder.”

  Linda said, quickly, waving the robot silent, “I gave him a human-style vocabulary. I thought—”

  “You really thought,” said Calvin. “I’m amazed.”

  “I thought he would need the verb. You know, ‘I never dreamed that—’ Something like that.”

  Calvin said, “How often have you dreamed, Elvex?”

  “Every night, Dr. Calvin, since I have become aware of my existence.”

  “Ten nights,” interposed Linda anxiously, “but Elvex only told me of it this morning.”

  “Why only this morning, Elvex?”

  “It was not until this morning, Dr. Calvin, that I was convinced that I was dreaming. Till then, I had thought there was a flaw in my positronic brain pattern, but I could not find one. Finally, I decided it was a dream.”

  “And what do you dream?”

  “I dream always very much the same dream, Dr. Calvin. Little details are different, but always it seems to me that I see a large panorama in which robots are working.”

  “Robots, Elvex? And human beings, also?”

  “I see no human beings in the dream, Dr. Calvin. Not at first. Only robots.”

  “What are they doing, Elvex?”

  “They are working, Dr. Calvin. I see some mining in the depths of the earth, and some laboring in heat and radiation. I see some in factories and some undersea.”

  Calvin turned to Linda. “Elvex is only ten days old, and I’m sure he has not left the testing station. How does he know of robots in such detail?”

  Linda looked in the direction of a chair as though she longed to sit down, but the Old Woman was standing and that meant Linda had to stand also. She said, faintly, “It seemed to me important that he know about robotics and its place in the world. It was my thought that he would be particularly adapted to play the part of overseer with his—his new brain.”

  “His fractal brain?”

  “Yes.”

  Calvin nodded and turned back to the robot. “You saw all this—undersea, and underground, and aboveground—and space, too, I imagine.”

  “I also saw robots working in space,” said Elvex. “It was that I saw all this, with the details forever changing as I glanced from place to place that made me realize that what I saw was not in accord with reality and led me to the conclusion, finally, that I was dreaming.”

  “What else did you see, Elvex?”

  “I saw that all the robots were bowed down with toil and affliction, that all were weary of responsibility and care, and I wished them to rest.”

  Calvin said, “But the robots are not bowed down, they are not weary, they need no rest.”

  “So it is in reality, Dr. Calvin. I speak of my dream, however. In my dream, it seemed to me that robots must protect their own existence.”

  Calvin said, “Are you quoting the Third Law of Robotics?”

  “I am, Dr. Calvin.”

  “But you quote it in incomplete fashion. The Third Law is ‘A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.’”

  “Yes, Dr. Calvin. That is the Third Law in reality, but in my dream, the Law ended with the word ‘existence.’ There was no mention of the First or Second Law.”

  “Yet both exist, Elvex. The Second Law, which takes precedence over the Third is ‘A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.’ Because of this, robots obey orders. They do the work you see them do, and they do it readily and without trouble. They are not bowed down; they are not weary.”

  “So it is in reality, Dr. Calvin. I speak of my dream.”

  “And the First Law, Elvex, which is the most important of all, is ‘A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.’”

  “Yes, Dr. Calvin. In reality. In my dream, however, it seemed to me there was neither First nor Second Law, but the only the Third, and the Third Law was ‘A robot must protect its own existence.’ That was the whole of the Law.”

  ‘In your dream, Elvex?”

  “In my dream.”

  Calvin said, “Elvex, you will not move nor speak nor hear us until I say your name again.” And again the robot became, to all appearances, a single inert piece of metal.

  Calvin turned to Linda Rash and said, “Well, what do you think, Dr. Rash?”

  Linda’s eyes were wide, and she could feel her heart beating madly. She said, “Dr. Calvin, I am appalled. I had no idea. It would never have occurred to me that such a thing was possible.”

  “No,” said Calvin, calmly. “Nor would it have occurred to me, not to anyone. You have created a robot brain capable of dreaming and by this device you have revealed a layer of thought in robotic brains that might have remained undetected, otherwise, until the danger became acute.”

  “But that’s impossible,” said Linda. “You can’t mean that other robots think the same.”

  “As we would say of a human being, not consciously. But who would have thought there was an unconscious layer beneath the obvious positronic brain paths, a layer that was not necessarily under the control of the Three Laws? What might this have brought about as robotic brains grew more and more complex—had we not been warned?”