that to happen; we can't allow it to happen. It's what we're fighting for: a clean human race, composed of the fit." Starr, speaking for Asimov, retorts: "Composed of those you consider fit. But fitness comes in all shapes and forms. The great men of Earth have come from the tall and the short, from all manner of head shapes, skin colors, and languages. Variety is our salvation and the salvation of all mankind". The Sirians' ideology is similar to that expressed by the Spacers in Asimov's "The Caves of Steel", published a few years earlier - though Starr's Earth is very different from the one depicted in that book. An even more similar ideology is described in The Key, one of Asimov's stories featuring Wendell Urth, where an extremist faction named the Ultras wants to establish such a society on Earth using a very similar rhetoric. At one point, Devoure threatens to have Bigman locked inside a ship without food and water, and then sent to his death by robots. Later, Bigman is almost killed by a robot on Devoure's orders. Since the society of Sirius is eugenically bred to be uniformly tall, the robot believes Devoure when he says the much shorter Bigman is not a human being. Both themes; of robots harming people despite the Three Laws of Robotics, due to incomplete definition of "harm" and "human", are featured in Asimov's Robot and Foundation series, most prominently with relation to the planet Solaria. In The Naked Sun, robots have been instructed to carry out crimes like poisoning by dividing the task among them so that they can't see the entire picture, while in Robots and Empire and Foundation and Earth, Solarian robots were shown to consider only Solarians to be humans, and thus have no problems with killing human beings from other planets. Also, the villain of The Naked Sun attempted to build robotic ships capable of destroying inhabited planets and crewed ships due to being unaware of the presence of humans. In this book, Bigman attempts to discuss the possible damage to the Solar System population with a robot, but it appears unaware of the data and programmed to ignore attempts to teach it about the matter. References External links 1958 American novels American science fiction novels Doubleday (publisher) books Fiction about main-belt asteroids Fiction set on Mimas (moon) Rings of Saturn in fiction Science fiction