Very heavy metal

I read a lot of science fiction between the ages of 11 and 15. It's a black hole of a genre, and whatever Stephen Hawking may say, boys often disappear into it and never recover their mass or energy.

In the Seventies, the so-called "golden age" of sci-fi wasn't long past. Writers who cut their teeth in the pulp magazines of the Forties and Fifties were still pumping out tales in which they wrestled with the conundrum of futurity.

Arthur C Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Philip K Dick, Isaac Asimov - these were the authors whose vision set the parameters for imagining the shape of things to come. The first three have all had film adaptations, now it's Asimov's turn.

In truth, while Asimov's robot stories have a certain ingenuity, the plots are clunky and the characters good old-fashioned cardboard cut-outs. It's easy to see why his work has had to wait for a director. He lacks the mystical codswallop of Clarke, which inspired Stanley Kubrick's 2001 (1968), or the metaphysical depth of Dick, which gave rise to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall (1990) and Steven Spielberg's AI (2001).

There isn't even the disturbing proto-fascism of Heinlein, which Verhoeven adapted to such satiric effect in Starship Troopers (1997). Instead, Asimov is the technophile's sci-fi writer, filling his pages with gizmos which looked plausible - if amazing - from the standpoint of the middle decades of the last century.

The most interesting of these was his blueprint for a fully functioning artificial intelligence, capable of autonomous action. Asimov anticipated such advances as parallel computing and nanotechnology. At the core of his robot he placed a "positronic brain", a lump of metal capable of containing the billions of electronic pathways necessary to simulate thought.

Having conceptualised a believable artificial brain - as good as, if not superior to a human's - Asimov then introduced the idea of a governor. This took the form of three immutable laws, hardwired into the robot to make it incapable of harming humans. Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics articulate the paradoxical nature of our understanding of free will itself.

For, if a robot is to obey the First Law - which dictates that it won't directly or indirectly harm any human - it will inevitably come into conflict with such common sense ethical notions as selfsacrifice and consequentialism.

This may seem like a heavy philosophic load for a Will Smith-led sci-fi spectacular to bear, but I, Robot almost manages it.

It's 2035, and Smith plays Del Spooner, a Chicago homicide detective with a trauma-induced robot phobia. In the near-future this is a bit like having a contemporary mobile-phone phobia, because these metallic servitors are everywhere: delivering for Fed-Ex, baking blueberry pie, tending bar and demolishing houses.