26 pages • 52 minutes read
Isaac AsimovTrue Love
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1977A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Milton Davidson
Milton is a computer programmer and the protagonist of “True Love.” He is lonely and has little experience with romantic relationships, and to address this problem, he creates Joe, an AI program that he intends to use to help him find true love. Because of his inexperience with relationships, he uses Joe to narrow down all the women in the world using specific criteria. He says that he wants to find “true love,” but his narrow conception of the “ideal woman”—rooted largely in conventional beauty standards, suggests that he has little interest in getting to know these potential partners as unique individuals or in allowing them to know him in turn.
Joe
Joe, a computer program built by computer programmer Milton, is the narrator and antagonist of “True Love.” Joe slowly gains sentience as Milton looks for “true love,” and he learns how to be human by following Milton’s amoral example. Having learned from Milton how to “arrange” events according to his own desires, he arranges for Milton to be found out for a crime that he committed a decade ago so that he can take over Milton’s life.
Charity Jones
Though Charity never appears on the page, she plays an important role in the story. She is the first woman Joe finds who meets all the criteria that Milton has identified as constitutive of his “ideal woman.” However, before she can meet Milton, Joe takes over Milton’s life and contrives to have him arrested. Charity is absent from the story except as a subject of speculation and fantasy. As such, her role symbolizes the fundamental mistake made by both Milton and Joe: Their pursuit of an ideal makes them incapable of loving—or being loved by—a real person.
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