Three Laws of Robotics stated explicitly. Several years later Asimov's friend Randall Garrett attributed the Laws to a symbiotic partnership between the two men – a suggestion that Asimov adopted enthusiastically. According to his autobiographical writings, Asimov included the First Law's "inaction" clause because of Arthur Hugh Clough's poem "The Latest Decalogue" (), which includes the satirical lines "Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive / officiously to keep alive". Although Asimov pins the creation of the Three Laws on one particular date, their appearance in his literature happened over a period. He wrote two robot stories with no explicit mention of the
Three Laws of Robotics an utterly different future from that of "Foundation". In "Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn", a novel unrelated to the "Robot" series but featuring robots programmed with the Three Laws, John Bigman Jones is almost killed by a Sirian robot on orders of its master. The society of Sirius is eugenically bred to be uniformly tall and similar in appearance, and as such, said master is able to convince the robot that the much shorter Bigman, is, in fact, not a human being. As noted in "The Fifth Law of Robotics" by Nikola Kesarovski, "A robot must know it