Books

First edition, first printing, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "For Dean McLaughlin, where would we be without readers? 12/2/50, Isaac Asimov". Dean Benjamin McLaughlin, Jr. (b. 1931) is an American science fiction author whose novels include Hawk Among the Sparrows (1968), which was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novella, and Dawn (1980), inspired by Asimov's own Nightfall (1941). This landmark collection of short stories includes "Liar", in which the author coined the term "robotics", and "Runaround", in which he sets out for the first time his Three Laws of Robotics. "Upon realizing he had coined a new and lasting word, Asimov recognized the uniquely profitable position he had created for himself, and along with the successful prediction of space travel, self-driving cars, and war-computers among others, would go on to position himself as a sort of friendly-but-rough-around-the-edges technological herald, someone entertaining, trustworthy, and often right" (Jung). The nine stories collected here were originally printed in the magazines Super Science Stories and Astounding Science Fiction between 1940 and 1950. Octavo. Original red cloth, spine lettered in black, robot design to front cover in black. With dust jacket. Lightly bumped; unclipped jacket slightly creased, spine sunned as usual, else bright: a very good copy in very good jacket. Gia Jung, "Our AI Overlord: The Cultural Persistence of Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics in Understanding Artificial Intelligence", Emergence, 5 June 2018.

I, Robot is a collection of nine science fiction short stories by Isaac Asimov, first published in 1950. It was Asimov's first book of robot stories, containing tales of positronic robots that are often conflicting with the famous Three Laws of Robotics.