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"The bottom line in the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes. Much better to rely on your own judgment, and your own mistakes."
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This kind of device is classic Adams; why restrict the characters to the people or sentient beings? You can instill personality in any device, if you really want to.
The door's "straight man," so to speak, is a very doleful robot, one which was built before emotional balance in robots was really perfected. In the above quotation, the robot Marvin is reading with an overload of irony.
The idea of the door with a personality is none the worse for having been used before; see the robot door from Philip K. Dick's 1953 story Colony, the Mark IV door keeping robot from A. Bertram Chandler's 1959 story Colony and the toll door from Philip K. Dick's excellent 1969 story Ubik. The earliest reference is probably the phonographic lock from A Journey to the Year 2025, by Clement Fezandie, published in 1921.
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