I just found out that the Elijah Baley books, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and the Foundation books, which I am beginning to get into, are linked by the book I just ordered from Amazon - Robots and Empire.
Upon reading Foundation I felt a tiny bit disappointed that this was a totally seperate ‘world’ to the one I’d become used to. Now I am happy because they are linked afterall. (even if it turns out to be a loose link).
If I am mistaken, don’t be affraid to correct me. I got this from the synopsis at Amazon. Until then I had assumed it was merely a continuation of the Elijah Baley stories.
(did I get the name right?)
You mean Isaac Azimuth?
His last half dozen or so books (two weeks worth of his output!) attempted to link his robot stories and his Empire stories into a single coordinated whole. I don’t think they were a succes; they seemed overly contrived. Plus, he took the successful resolution at the end of Second Foundation and pretty much tossed it into the dumper in favor of the 'hive mind" - not a happy outcome to my Heinleinian tastes.
Of course, Heinlein attempted to bring just about every character into the post-Number of the Beast “multiverse” in HIS last half-dozen books, and that pretty much sucked as well.
Clarke seems to have pretty much handed off his writing to others, supplying just the core of the story. Depending on the collaborator, it sometimes works OK, but more often not.
Oh, well, I can always walk down the library and find their good stuff.
Brother, are you ever right. That whole deal with the Zero-eth Law, Giscard teaching telepathy, and Daneel O on the Moon was a bit contrived. But, it worked.
I dunno… I like it when books are planned from the get-go as part of a cohesive whole, but when you take worlds which were originally separate and try to merge them, the continuity almost always ends up mangled. There are a number of cases in Asimov where A is in continuity with B, and B is in continuity with C, but A and C are inconsistent. And even in the things which were intended to all be consistent, there’s some significant holes. For instance, in The Naked Sun, we learn that nobody’s ever been able to make a robotic surgeon, since cutting people open would fry a robot’s brain via the First Law (even if it was necessary to save the human’s life). But in “The Bicentennial Man”, which undoubtably takes place earlier, robotic surgeons are the norm. When you try to tie together worlds as developed as Foundation and the Lije Bailey stories, you get that sort of conflict a hundredfold.
Me, too. But … if I recall correctly … didn’t David Brin pretty much scotch that future, at the end of “Foundation’s Triumph”? (Correct me if I’m wrong; I haven’t read the book, just glanced through it.) He pointed out that
a hive mind would have no need of books – for example, encyclopedias. Yet we are frequently given quotations from the Encyclopedia Galactica of the Second Empire period. Brin suggests that, rather than Gaia absorbing the Foundation, instead the Foundation will ultimately absorb Gaia.
Note that the Encyclopeadia Galactica link below lists the cronological order of the Empire Novels incorrectly. See Isaac Asimov FAQ for the proper order.
I read the original foundation series many moons ago and coincidentally enough am just now reading all the robot books and the extra Foundation books. I find it quite fascinating to read them in time order, and have gotten a real kick out of seeing how Big A tried to tie the books together. Obviously when the Empire series call Earth a radioactive planet, Asimov had pictured contamination from a nuclear war, but having just come from reading Robots and Empire, I knew what had REALLY happened.
Sure, there’s some slop, but geez, the first Robot stories were written when he was like 18 or something and the final tie in was done 40 years later.
I always felt that I.A. was attempting to beef up sales of his books by tying the series together. That way fans of the one series will want to buy the others.
It destroys the “purity” of the individual series, which weren’t originally meant to go together, but I could easily overcome my objections if my income were increased.
I’m not trying to be cynical here – I still haven’t seen a net profit from my own publishing ventures, so I can see the point.
That was why I haven’t actually read the book in question. :dubious: I was curious enough to flip through it in a bookshop, though, and noticed the point in question.
Except that the quotes are usually given as around year 1050 foundational era edition of the ‘galactica’, and IIRC in foundation’s edge-foundation and earth, it is established that galaxia will take more than 500 years to develop. Therefore, Galaxia will allow the second empire to be formed as it continues its own plans… that’s the way I always thought of it.
Yes… per ‘foundation and earth’ and others, the foundation books follow the robot series. ‘forward the foundation’ suggests that foundation might also follow the novel Nemesis. But the histories of space colonization and the development of hyperspacial travel portrayed in the robot series and ‘nemesis’ are extremely difficult to reconcile.
The other possibility is that some of asimov’s work are all ‘real’ in the same continuous history, and that other pieces are folk legends but not historically accurate in that continuity. (does that make sense??) ‘Bicentennial man’ and ‘nemesis’ make sense as asimovian pseudo-canon in this sense. (Was there ever much of a reference to bicentennial man itself in any of the other major novels??)
The invention of humanoid robots seems to be a recurring theme in his books… ‘satisfaction guaranteed’, ‘evidence’, ‘bicentennial man’ and ‘caves of steel’ each cover that ground without much of a nod that it had ever been tread before.
True… One of the Foundation prequels has a scenario very much like Stephen Byerley’s campaign for office, but I don’t remember if the Byerley campaign is specifically mentioned or not. Anyone else recall?
You also get things like “Victory Unintentional” and the later Lucky Starr novels trying to tie into the robot continuity, but both of those stories have multiple intelligent races in the Solar System, whereas in the Foundation universe, it’s explicit that humans (and whatever we made, such as robots and Solarians) are the only intelligent folks in the whole Galaxy.
