Smile
The Doctor and Bill explore Erehwon, an Earth colony in the far future where a utopian city has been constructed by Vardy microbots. But the city is deserted and the time-travellers soon discover that the Vardy will kill anyone who isn’t happy…
FEATURE BY CHRIS BENTLEY
American author Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) was the undisputed master of the science-fiction mystery story, and his work in that genre was always at its most compelling when it involved robots. Asimov had a keen interest in the thought processes that might develop in the positronic brains of sentient robots programmed with his own three laws of robotics, the foremost of which stated that a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Many of his robot stories – notably those in his episodic 1950 novel I, Robot – explored the circumstances that might lead a robot to contravene that first law.