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The Naked Sun was the last science-fiction novel Asimov would write until The Gods Themselves fifteen years later (aside from a couple of his juvenile novels and his novelization of the film Fantastic Voyage). Why not a third robot novel to make the series a trilogy? After all, the trilogy seems like the natural science-fiction series unless the series continues interminably. In the second decade of the century there were the George Allan England Darkness and Dawn trilogy, the Charles B. Stilson Polaris trilogy, and J. U. Giesy's "Dog Star" trilogy; more recently have come J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-55), Harry Harrison's East of Eden trilogy, Brian W. Aldiss's Helliconia trilogy, and so many fantasy trilogies that one loses track. And, of course, The Foundation Trilogy. Asimov answered the question himself in The Rest of the Robots, which in the Doubleday edition included the robot novels. |
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While I was writing The Naked Sun, it became perfectly clear to me that what I was working on was the second novel of a trilogy. |
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In The Caves of Steel I had a society heavily overweighted in favor of humanity, with the robots unwelcome intruders. In The Naked Sun, on the other hand I had an almost pure robot society with only a thin leaven of humanity barely holding it together. |
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What I needed to do next was to form the perfect topper to my vision of the future by setting the third novel of the trilogy in Aurora, and depicting the complete fusion of man and robot into a society that was more than both and better than either. |
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In the summer of 1958 I even started the novel, and then somewhere in the fourth chapter, between one page and the next, something happened. |
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What had happened was Sputnik. By the summer of 1958 Asimov had decided that "the American public deserved understanding of science and that it was the burning duty of writing scientists to try to give them that understanding." He turned to the subsequent science popularizations that brought him fame and fortune and that make up the majority of his 470 books. |
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The explanation of the decision is neat and no doubt true as far as it went. But there were other reasons. Asimov may have reached the limits of his accomplishments in science fiction. He mentioned this in his autobiography: |
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As to my other career, science fiction, there, too, I had gone as far as I could. I might do things that were better than "Nightfall," The Foundation Trilogy, I, Robot, or The Caves of Steel, but surely not much better. These were already recognized as classics, and I had been writing for fifteen years and I had yet to make more than ten or eleven thousand dollars a year as a writer. |
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