Frankenstein influenced Robot

Asimov coined the term "Frankenstein complex" for the thing he was writing against, and used it for decades: the assumption, which he traced directly to Shelley, that a made intelligence must inevitably turn on its maker. The Three Laws exist to refuse it. A robot may not harm a human, must obey, must protect itself in that order, and the stories then work as puzzles about what follows, rather than as monster stories. Asimov said outright that he was bored of the one plot the field kept telling and built a machine that could not tell it. Filed as a reaction against rather than an influence because the debt is real and the direction is negative: without Shelley's plot there is nothing for the Laws to be an answer to. Aimed at the Robot series, with the Laws first appearing in the 1942 story Runaround and collected in I, Robot.