Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
I, Robot.
Asimov was explicitly trying to get away from the trope of "robots take over humanity". To be clear, the first short story that became I, Robot was published in 1940. "Robots take over humanity" was already an SF trope by then. Hollywood comes along more than half a century later and dives head first right back into that trope.
Lt Cmdr Data is more what Asimov had it mind. In fact, Data's character has direct references to Asimov, like his positronic brain.
I, Robot was about as far from the source material as you could get.
That sounds like a challenge to Hollywood. Though I'd put Starship Troopers up there too, haven't scrolled enough to see it mentioned but I assume it is.
Edit okay I did now and it's not mentioned. While a fun movie it doesn't have nearly the same story that the book does. Still I'll watch it for what it is, but doesn't have the same tone or scenes the book does.
You’re right, Starship Troopers should be way up on the list, too.
The only thing that advertisement masquerading as a movie has in common with the Asimov work is the title.
Robots take over humanity has been around since literally the first robot story. R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) is where the word robot was coined.
Shouldn't be called an adaptation, really. They only dressed it up a tiny bit as Asimov for marketing reasons
From what I heard, they got the rights to I, Robot, grabbed some script about a robot uprising that they already had optioned, and slapped a few things on it.
This is apparently fairly common. If there's a Hollywood movie based on something that doesn't really align with the original, there's a good chance that this is what happened. Starship Troopers was the same way (though that's a whole different ballgame on whether the Hollywood version is good on its own merits).
Asimov came up with the three laws of robotics.
He then spent the rest of his life writing examples of how they don't work.