Susan Calvin

Dr. Susan Calvin is a fictional character from Isaac Asimov's Robot Series. She was the chief robopsychologist at US Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., the major manufacturer of robots in the 21st century. She was the main character in many short stories from the books I, Robot and The Complete Robot.

Biography

According to Asimov's fictional history of robotics, Susan Calvin was born in 1982, the same year that US Robots and Mechanical Men was incorporated. At 16 she wrote the first of many papers on robotics, a Physics-1 paper entitled 'Practical Aspects of Robotics'. Four years later in 2002, she attended a Psycho-Math seminar at which Dr Alfred Lanning of US Robots demonstrated the first mobile robot to be equipped with a voice.

Graduating with a bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 2003, she began post-graduate work in cybernetics, learning to construct positronic brains such that responses to given stimuli could be accurately predicted. Obtaining her Ph.D. in 2008, she joined US Robots the same year as their first Robopsychologist. By 2029, when she left Earth for the first time to visit Hyper Base, her formal title was Head Psychologist.

When starting her work as a Psychiatrist in 2035, she was handed three cases: a traumatized girl that has not talked for 6 years, an obese Africa-American boy that can't stop eating, and a 4 year old girl accused of attempted murder

Susan Calvin retired from US Robots in 2057 but continued to act as an occasional consultant for the company. She died in 2064, aged 82.

Character profile

Typically, Asimov portrays Dr. Calvin as a highly driven woman, focused on her work and divorced from normal emotions, almost more "robotic" than her mechanical characters. She likes robots considerably more than human beings; in "Evidence", when asked "Are robots so different from men?", she replies, "Worlds different. Robots are essentially decent." Asimov's own stories leave her misanthropy largely unexplained, but Harlan Ellison's screenplay adaptation of I, Robot investigates its origins, in the end concluding that her attitudes are rather well-founded.

One of the continuing themes in Asimov's work is the essential irony that, although the Three Laws of Robotics make robots value human beings over themselves, Susan Calvin's estimation of robotic decency may not be entirely wrong.

An excerpt from I, Robot has this to say about Dr. Calvin: "She is a small woman, but there is a towering strength in her face. Tensile strength, that speaks to endurance, to maintaining in the imperfect world. Her mouth is thin, and her face pale. Grace lives in her features, and intelligence; but she is not an attractive woman. She is not one of those women who in later years it can be said of them, 'She must have been a beauty when she was younger.' Susan Calvin was always plain. And clearly, always a powerful personality."

It was not until a mention of her in The Robots of Dawn, Asimov's third Elijah Baley Robot novel, that the events of her era (the 21st century) were concretely tied into those of Baley's era, at least two-and-a-half millennia further into the future, and thus into the greater Foundation universe as a whole.

Susan Calvin, as portrayed by Bridget Moynahan, in the 2004 film adaptation, I, Robot.

Portrayals in other media

She was played by three separate actresses in British television, beginning in 1962 with Maxine Audley in an adaption of "Little Lost Robot" for the TV series Out of This World, then later played by Beatrix Lehmann in the 1967 "The Prophet", and followed by Wendy Gifford in 1969's "Liar!" both being episodes in the series Out of the Unknown. Ann Firbank portrayed the character, renamed Inge Jensen, in the Out of the Unknown adaptation of "Satisfaction Guaranteed". Margaret Robertson played her in the BBC Radio 4 adaptation of the same story.

In the film I, Robot, Calvin is played by Bridget Moynahan and serves as an operative who "makes the robots seem more human" and is completely dependent on the Three Laws of Robotics. She initially does not believe in Del Spooner's assertion that robots can be bad, despite running into the lawless NS-5 "Sonny". She eventually finds out that Sonny actually did kill Dr. Alfred Lanning.

References by other writers

Arthur C. Clarke also mentions Susan Calvin, in his novel 3001: The Final Odyssey. She appears alongside Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper as a female "role-model" in "the battle of wits between man and machine" (Chapter 36: Chamber of Horrors). It is unclear whether Clarke is referring to Calvin in the sense of Asimov's fictional character or as a character who existed in his fictional universe.

Susan Calvin also appears in David Wingrove's illustrated fiction "The Immortals of Science Fiction" (1980). Here she is interviewed, along with nine other famous science fiction characters.

In November 2009, the Isaac Asimov estate announced the upcoming publication of Robots and Chaos, the first volume in a trilogy featuring Susan Calvin by fantasy author Mickey Zucker Reichert. The book was published in November, 2011 under the title I, Robot: To Protect.

List of Stories featuring Susan Calvin

• "Escape!"
• "Evidence"
• "The Evitable Conflict"
• "Feminine Intuition"
• "Galley Slave"
• "Lenny"
• "Liar!"
• "Little Lost Robot"
• "Risk"
• "Robbie" (cameo as a teenage girl in 1998)
• "Robot Dreams"
• "Runaround" (briefly mentioned by Gregory Powell)
• "Satisfaction Guaranteed"
• Foundation's Friends:
  • "Balance"
  • "PAPPI"
  • "Plato's Cave"
  • "The Fourth Law of Robotics"

References

• In Memory Yet Green/In Joy Still Felt, by Isaac Asimov. Asimov's two volume Autobiography.
• The Complete Robot by Isaac Asimov. A collection of Robot stories with introductions.