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Asimov used Foundation's Edge to bring the Foundation universe into the beginnings of a consistency with the rest of his stories, in particular the robot stories, and he used The Robots of Dawn to bring The Robot Novels into the same consistency. There are no robots in the Foundation universe at least until Foundation's Edge. Asimov had discussed with his paperback editors (and friends), the del Reys, Judy-Lynn and Lester, his plans to bring his novels into a self-consistent body of work, and they thought it was a terrible idea. Asimov was worried that the del Reys might not buy the paperback rights, particularly to the sequel, Robots and Empire, but his editor, now Kate Medina, said that was Doubleday's worry. When The Robots of Dawn appeared, Brian Stableford called Asimov's attempts to bring his various novels into one consistent future history misguided (as a foolish consistency, that is). I suspect that Asimov would have replied that it was his creation and, like God, he could do what he liked with it. I look upon Asimov's concern with this side issue as a kind of playfulness that I find amusing if not altogether artistically rewarding (not, as Stableford would have it, comforting in its claustrophiliac enclosure). We should be willing to concede to Asimov the same kind of freedom we grant to writers of more traditional narrative. |
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One reason I find The Robots of Dawn superior to Foundation's Edge is that the situation of the Robot novels automatically leads to more satisfying fiction. The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun are better novels to me (and to Asimov, as well, who in his autobiography calls what he was writing in 1953 and the years immediately following and specifically The Caves of Steel his "peak period") because they are more concerned with character, and his characters are more like real people than the functional rationalists of his other work and perform in settings that are more like real places than the bare stage on which his other characters acted out their dramas. Because of their subjects, the Robot novels are works concerned with character, and character highly influenced by environment, at that; in addition Asimov chooses to tell his Robot novels through a flawed viewpoint character who must not only solve problems but change in the process. Fiction developed around these kinds of concerns is likely to be more rounded and more pleasing, and The Robots of Dawn shares the qualities of its predecessors. |
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The first two Robot novels, like their sequel, focus on the psychological problems and rational investigations of Elijah (Lije) Baley, the civil-service detective of a greater New York City that has developed three thousand years in the future. The cities of Earth have roofed themselves over, and the crowded people of Earth have become so accustomed to |
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