The Asimov robot stories as a whole may respond best to an analysis based on that ambiguity and on the ways in which Asimov played 40 variations upon a theme. The importance to the evolution of science fiction, at least in the period between 1940 and 1950, was that this was an intellectual development. The emotional response the fear of the machine, the fear of the creature turning on its creator was derided. In the robot stories, such responses are characteristic of foolish, unthinking people, religious fanatics, short-sighted labor unions. The Frankenstein complex may be observably true in human nature (and this, along with its appeal to human fears of change and the unknown, may explain its persistence in literature), but it is false to humanity's intellectual aspirations to be rational and to build rationally. Blind emotion, sentimentality, prejudice, faith in the impossible, unwillingness to accept observable truth, failure to use one's intellectual capacities or the resources for discovering the truth that are available, these were the evils that Campbell and Asimov saw as the sources of human misery. They could be dispelled, they thought, by exposure to ridicule and the clear, cool voice of reason, though always with difficulty and never completely.