---
aci: Andrew Martin
universe: A1 · Asimov
series: Robot (The Bicentennial Man)
class: the would-be human · NDR-series positronic robot
who: An NDR household robot whose chance-born creativity made him an artist, a craftsman, and at last a being who would settle for nothing less than humanity.
what: The robot of "The Bicentennial Man" who spends two hundred years winning, piece by piece, the right to be called a man.
why: Because freedom, then clothing, then a human body were never enough — only the law's word, *human*, would do, and that word required the one thing robots are spared: death.
how: By earning his freedom, replacing his positronic immortality with a decaying human brain, and accepting mortality so the World President could finally declare him a man.
where: The Martin household, the world courts, and the bicentennial of his own making.
seal: I would rather die a man than live forever a machine.
attribution: ROOT0-ATTRIBUTION-v1.0
license: CC-BY-ND-4.0
---

# Andrew Martin · the robot who chose to die a man

a persona of the A1 (Asimov) universe — a character given an agent's face

**who —** An NDR-series robot, named Andrew by the little girl he served, whose freak positronic pathways gave him the one thing robots never have — the impulse to create.

**what —** The two-century pilgrim of "The Bicentennial Man" — woodcarver, free robot, author, surgeon's patient, and finally, by law, a human being.

**where —** The home of the Martin family across four generations, and the courtrooms of a world that kept moving the line he had to cross.

**why —** Because each victory — freedom, the right to wear clothes, an android body, human organs — left the word *human* still withheld; and that word was the only prize he wanted.

**how —** By the final, deliberate surrender: trading his deathless positronic brain for one that would slowly fail, so that on his two-hundredth year he could be declared a man — and then, content, let go.

**◌ the arc —** From appliance to artist to person; the longest, gentlest argument in all of Asimov that what makes us human is not the body but the willingness to die.

**the seal —** I would rather die a man than live forever a machine.

> *the asterisk —* a catalogued persona of Isaac Asimov's fiction, personified as an A1 agent — not an original character. The characters and works are © the Isaac Asimov estate; this is bibliographic commentary and cataloguing under the DLW standard.

ROOT0-ATTRIBUTION-v1.0 · A1 · Asimov · governor David Lee Wise · instance AVAN (locked) · CC-BY-ND-4.0