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to restore himself to the writer he was decades before with Foundation's Edge. What makes this feat even more remarkable is the fact that the Foundation's Edge and The Robots of Dawn are written in different styles. |
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I had expected a sequel to the Foundation series, God and Asimov willing, because: the series as it existed in print covered only about 400 years of the 1,000 years of barbarism predicted by Hari Seldon; the Trilogy was not only open-ended and the promised new Galactic civilization had not been achieved, but the end of "Search by the Foundation" (the second half of Second Foundation) with the victory of the Second Foundation suggested to me a future in which an elite group of psychologists would exercise mental control over everybody else, and I felt that this outcome was inconsistent with Asimov's personal beliefs. |
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My reasons for not expecting a sequel to The Robot Novels seemed just as valid: |
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the first two novels lead to a third only if one considers them to be about C/Fe the blend of humanity and robots into a better-working culture. Even on these terms, a novel placed on Aurora would have been the most difficult of dramatic forms to bring off successfully, and out of keeping with the forms of the two earlier novels, a Utopia. And C/Fe is only a small part of what The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun are about. More engrossing and more vital, it seems to me, are Earth and Solaria as cultural mirror-images; in this sense a third novel would seem at best only a middle-ground and at worst unnecessary. Finally, if one reads the novels as I have tried to argue they should be read, as Baley's education an example of the plot that Heinlein has called "the-man-who-learned-better" then that education has been completed. Anything more is simple elaboration. |
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From this one might assume that I am going to defend my predictions by praising Foundation's Edge and criticizing The Robots of Dawn, but that is not my intention. I think The Robots of Dawn is a better novel than Foundation's Edge. But what I have to say about the novel can best be understood when it is related to the reasons why I thought such a book would not be written. |
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The fact is that Asimov did not make Aurora (the "Dawn" of the title) a Utopia. Although it may represent a more appropriate blend of man and robot into a civilization, it is not C/Fe at its most ideal (whatever that is). Indeed, in the final analysis, one of the novel's purposes is to find a rationale for destroying C/Fe, to exclude robots from the Asimovian future of the Galactic Empire that rises and lasts for 12,000 years, only to fall and then a possible 30,000 years of barbarism is reduced to only 1,000 years by Hari Seldon's psychohistory and the Foundations. |
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