A Boy's Best Friend Trivia Quiz

Answer:

"A Boy's Best Friend" provides the reader with an opportunity to reflect on different types of relationship, whether it be human-human, human-canine or human-robot. It is a short story written by Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer strongly associated with "robotics", a word that he is said to have coined (though the word "robot" is attributed to the playwright, Karel Čapek).

Asimov, born in Soviet Russia in 1920, was a trained biochemist, but it is for his literature - a large proportion of which takes the form of short stories - and formative contributions to what would now be broadly referred to as artificial intelligence - especially his "Three Laws of Robotics" - that he is remembered. His short stories (and novels) would periodically be organised into compilations such as "I, Robot" (1950), "The Rest of the Robots" (1964) and "The Complete Robot" (1982). As suggested by the name, "The Complete Robot" contains all the content from the previous compilations; Asimov continued writing into the 1990s and additional compilations were published that organised his later content.

The first story in "The Complete Robot" is "A Boy's Best Friend" - a short with many similarities to a better known Asimov story titled "Robbie" - in which a Moonborn boy called Jimmy lives on the outskirts of Lunar City and spends a lot of time in the company of his robotic dog, Robutt (name derived from a combination of "robot" and "mutt"). He lives with his parents, Mr and Mrs Anderson, who were born on Earth (Asimov is explicit about this for Jimmy's father but leaves it implied for Mrs Anderson).

Whilst Jimmy is out playing in a crater with Robutt, his parents discuss the news that the organic dog that they had bought had recently arrived at the rocket station in Lunar City. They were excited that Jimmy would soon get to experience the joy that a "real" dog could bring as well as feel the "genuine" love that, in their view, only comes from a carbon-based canine.

Jimmy returns home and his parents share the news with him, also alerting him to the fact he could only keep one of the two pets. The youngster adopts a different perspective to the one his parents appear to expect. In Jimmy's view, Robutt does everything that a child would want him to do and refutes his dad's suggestion that because Robutt is programmed to behave as he does, the bond they share is somehow lesser. Isaac Asimov's preference for the Robot-as-Pathos classification is clear to see here; Robutt is doting and would never allow Jimmy to come to harm.

Jimmy also attempts to bring some nuance to the view of his parents by asking them if it is at all possible that an organic dog could also be considered to be "programmed" to behave in a certain way. How could the true motivation behind the actions and affections of the terrier arriving from Earth be known? Is animal instinct its own type of programming?

As "A Boy's Best Friend" is only a few pages in length, the story doesn't continue to the point where Jimmy actually meets the new dog. Instead it ends with Robutt squeaking with joy - no doubt as his positronic brain is programmed to do - at the fact that his beloved Jimmy is defending their friendship. It is left to the imagination as to whether his views on the matter would change after the terrier arrives. Would Jimmy see what his parents were trying to tell him? Which dog would he keep?