Three Craws

In The Rest of the Robots, published in 1964, Isaac Asimov noted that when he began writing in 1940 he felt that "one of the stock plots of science fiction was ... robots were created and destroyed their creator. Knowledge has its dangers, yes, but is the response to be a retreat from knowledge? Or is knowledge to be used as itself a barrier to the dangers it brings?" He decided that in his stories a robot would not "turn stupidly on his creator for no purpose but to demonstrate, for one more weary time, the crime and punishment of Faust." On May 3, 1939, Asimov attended a meeting of the Queens (New York) Science Fiction Society where he met Earl and Otto Binder who had recently published a…