[QUOTE=glee]
Dear All,
Having read the Foundation trilogy before many of you were born :eek: , I happily continued through many further Foundation books which included appearances by robots Daneel and Giskard, with references to Elijah Baley (and so on).
Now my advanced age means that details are escaping me. :o
I’ve just reread ‘Robots and Empire’, in which Giskard ‘freezes’ after teaching Daneel how to detect and control emotions. Yet I can’t remember how it all fits together. 
Could some wise soul please tie up the entire plot (robots, Baley, Hari Seldon, Foundation, Gaia etc)?
Thanks!
[/QUOTE]
Oooh, a chance to use my amazingly trivial knowledge of Asimovania for the public good!
Okay. Sometime around the 30th century Elijah Baley, a mid-ranking plainclothes officer in the New York City dome’s civil service, is assigned to investigate the murder of an important Spacer scientist visiting Earth, along with a Spacer Robot partner that looks exactly like a human - R Daneel Olivaw. Initially furious with the robot teammate, (and under strict orders to make sure that Daneel doesn’t “get the collar” or all human policemen might get replaced with robots,) Baley solves the case with chutzpah despite attempts to get him taken off duty, and comes to think of Daneel as a friend.
He starts to get a rep in Spacer circles for this, and is requested by the bizarre planet of Solaria, who have almost no crime of their own and no law enforcement, to solve a murder there. Daneel comes along too, and they are succesful again. This case is made into a hyperwave drama (with the usual innacuracies of ‘real murder cases’ becoming entertainment media,) to the annoyance of both Baley and his superiors in the service. Baley is growing increasingly committed to the movement of Earth emigration to found new colony planets, despite the fact that the powerful existing Spacer worlds are unlikely to tolerate this.
Baley is called out from Earth once again, to solve the destruction of another robot of Daneel’s model, which for various complicated reasons is an important political point on the most powerful Spacer planet. Daneel figures out some very interesting things and manages to secure the political triumph of the Moderates who look fairly kindly on Earth, and the downfall of the Spacer supremacists. He also meets Giskard, an ordinary looking servitor robot, and finds out that Giskard can read and affect minds. Giskard had destroyed the robot Jander to keep the Spacer supremacists from finding out how to make human-looking robots of their own.
New earth colonies on other planets are established, one of them led by Baley’s son, and Baley himself dies. A new mystery takes Daneel and Giskard’s new owner, the spacer woman Gladia (incidentally Baley’s lover,) into the turbulent galaxy. Daneel and Giskard are getting increasingly secretive and canny by this point, talking about a number of things that they do not reveal to their mistress or any other human. Together, they found the idea of the ‘zeroth law’ - that protecting humanity as a whole from harm must take priority over even guarding individual humans, and confront the architects of a plot to destroy Earth in waves of radioactivity, without trace of who did the deed. Giskard has a chance to save the earth, but allows it to be killed slowly, so that most of the population could be evacuated - because he believes that the cultlike ‘Earth mother worship’ that the colonies have developed would do them harm. That dubious decision is his death sentence, and he passes his mental talents on to Baley, with warnings, before dying.
Fast forward, erm, twenty thousand years or so.
Daneel has established himself in a cover identity as the Emperor Cleon’s trusted first minister, Demerzel. He’s convinced that the Empire is about to crumble, and not sure what he can do to help minimize the harm to the trillions of human beings in the galaxy as a result. He has already been working to found Gaia, a hidden world where all the people, animals, plants, and even rocks have become a single conscious entity, but is uncertain whether Gaia expanded - Galaxia, is the destiny of the galaxy or even feasible. The emperor mentions that some young mathematics student has caused a stir at a convention for presenting a paper that indicated that the future of human populations could be predicted statistically.
Daneel swings into furious action around this naive outworlder, Hari Seldon - bringing him in for a formal audience with the emperor and listening closely as Hari explains how his theory is a mathematical curiosity and has no practical value. He lets Hari go, but knowing that enemies of the Empire might use him as a tool even without practical development of Psychohistory, (and wanting the real thing badly to solve his own problems surrounding the empire’s troubles,) Daneel assumes another identity, Chetter Hummin, the idealistic, well-connected journalist, and sends Hari off on a Flight around the Imperial planet of Trantor, invoking the feared name of Demerzel to keep him working on the puzzle of making Psychohistory plausible. At the end of the Flight, Seldon is in fact captured by the Mayor of Wye, who want to use false predictions from him to help overthrow Cleon, but Daneel stops the plan, and the Mayor’s daughter ‘outs’ Chetter as being Demerzel in front of Hari. Hari guesses that Demerzel is Daneel (who he heard rumors about during the flight,) and Daneel confirms the guess. Hari starts working on psychohistory on Daneel’s behalf.
Daneel steps down as first minister after a plot to have him replaced forcibly is foiled, and nominates Hari as his replacement. Hari does his best, but in the middle of a convoluted plot targeting Hari himself, Cleon is killed by a gardener who was furious with being promoted above the job that he loved. Hari helps bring down a military junta who ruled the Empire for a short time after the assasination, and then his plans to found two Foundations to ensure the future after the fall of the Empire start to come together, though he has to struggle to find enough financial resources to see the plan through.
The first foundation, on the remote planet of Terminus, grows from a tiny state-supported encyclopedia compilation institute to the seat of a massive and flourishing trade empire, growing large enough that corruption starts to set in there as well. The mule, a genetic mutant who could control people’s emotions, rises to power in a series of leapfrog steps, conquers the first Foundation and a huge swath of the galaxy including what is left of the heart of the Empire, and nearly finds the mysterious, mind-affecting psychohistorians of the second foundation, but he is defeated and controlled by the second foundationers, and after his death, the first foundation is re-established. The first foundation starts to fear the second foundation as a mysterious ‘bogeyman’ controlling their lives, so the second foundationers create a hoax of their own discovery and capture by the first, hoping to drop off the radar that way.
Halfway through the thousand-year seldon plan, Golan Trevize, an eccentric foundation councilman who has come to believe that the second foundation still exists, is arrested by the foundation mayor and sent off into exile to search for it. (The mayor believes that the second foundation is real too, but is trying to work as secretly as she can against it.) Trevize instead is drawn to the planet Gaia, with the mayor and the leader of the second foundation following him, for a staged three-way mexican standoff. Gaia wants Trevize, because they believe that he can be intuitively ‘right’ about a decision with little evidence, to choose who will rule the galaxy out of the two foundations and themselves. Trevize chooses Gaia-Galaxia, but then challenges the elder of Gaia and says that his decision will not stand unless he can find the lost homeworld of humanity, Earth, which is being kept hidden from everybody, including Gaia itself.
Trevize and a small party, (a Foundation scholar, and a Gaian woman who the scholar has fallen in love with,) set out for earth, retracing some of the steps that Gladia and her robots took so many thousands of years before. On their way through some of the forgotten Spacer worlds, they rescue a Solarian child, who has unusual powers and would have been killed if left to the care of the Solarian guard robots. They find Earth, a devastated, radioactive planet, but don’t leave the area entirely before finding Daneel’s secret hideout on the moon. Daneel tells Trevize that he supports his choice, and asks if Trevize’s decision to support Galaxia has changed now that Trevize knows about him. Trevize re-affirms his decision, largely because he’s worried that our galaxy might get invaded by others, and only Galaxia can repel invaders in a unified way. Daneel mentions at this point that he’s so ancient that he’s at death’s door, and cannot repair himself in any conventional way. The only way he can last long enough to see Galaxia started is to join his circuits with the solarian child’s mind. And that’s pretty much the end of it.
Hope that answers your questions.
