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Page 118
Moreover, the third novel in the prospective trilogy was not going well. Asimov would not abandon what he considered to be his best writing in the midst of what he considered his best novels and never return. A third factor in his decision may have been that the first two novels led 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 from that perspective, a novel placed on Aurora would have been the most difficult to bring off successfully, and out of keeping with the utopian forms of the two earlier novels. 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 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 being about Baley's education as examples of the type of plot Heinlein has called "the man-who-learned-better" then that education had been completed. Anything more was simply elaboration. Unlike The Foundation Trilogy, which seemed to cry out for a fourth volume, The Robot Novels were complete with two.
In addition to their own value as the finest expressions of Asimov's art, The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun stand as touchstones for the way in which they exemplify a basic difference (perhaps the basic difference) between science fiction and mainstream fiction the concept of human adaptability. The influence of Darwin's 1859 Origin of Species has been recognized by many scholars; evolution and natural selection not only shaped H. G. Wells, who, in turn, shaped science fiction; the theory of evolution, whether accepted or rejected, changed forever the way people thought about their place in the universe. In adopting evolution, along with all other scientific concepts of the way things work, however, science-fiction writers also adopted a view of humanity that mainstream fiction rejected: humans, like the rest of the natural world, are not fixed in form or function; people, like whales and elephants, bacteria and viruses, are mutable, not only selected by but shaped by their environments. The human environment, however, increasingly is social, and the fabric of society is woven by science and technology.
The reader can see adaptability of humanity as the unstated premise of The Robot Novels. Earthmen, long accustomed to living in their caves of steel, have accepted it as the natural way of life and their agoraphobia as a normal condition. The Solarians, on the other hand, have become so accustomed to their limited numbers and vast estates that they consider their agoraphilia the ideal state of humanity.

 
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