the good stuff, like I, Robot, and the ideas and ethics are still fresh. There’s not much in today’s art cinema AI scripts that you won’t find swiped from Isaac’s short stories. And his 1950s foreseeing that’s turned out to be wrong is no less fascinating than the human-machine psychodramas where his prescience struts. He’s too careful at times – with world population growth, miniaturization and all things digital – or too wild, with his family jet cars and day tripper space rides. But how often does a fiction writer ingrain and fuse ideas in the imagination of the people designing and constructing our futures? Or is this true of all great books? What power that is to dream of, for the lowly scribe.
