He got older, and got his head wrapped around a bad idea (“I’ll tie all my books together!”). Pity. Nothing comes close to the original trilogy.
Kinda like what happened to Frank Herbert after “Dune”.
And Heinlein after “Number of the Beast” and Clarke after “Rama”… It seems to be a disease of elderly SF authors.
I assume that you meant to include Number of the Beast itself also? Man, what a waste of my reading time that was, and I didn’t even mind Cat Who Walks Through Walls.
And thus, Fenris’ Law triumphs again.
Actually, if “Number of the Beast” was a onetime shot, it would have been OK – a lesser effort, but OK – but then he raked it into every subsequent novel except JOB – which stunk in its own right.
OK, I’m not familiar with this one, and the pesky three letter word rule hinders searching. What is Fenris’ law?
“As an online discussion of science fiction or fantasy grows longer, the probability of a Heinlein centered digression or flame war taking over the thread approaches one.”
And as an aside:
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The Robot novels are NOT connected in any way, shape or form to the Foundation or Trantorian Empire novels. Also, HIGHLANDER II, STAR TREK V and ALIENS[sup]3[/sup] did not exist.
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The correct order in which to read the Foundation series is as follows:
[ul]
[li]Foundation[/li][li]Foundation and Empire[/li][li]Second Foundation[/li][li]Psychohistorical Crisis (A little known masterpiece of an unauthorized sequel* by Donald Kingsbury that (correctly) ignores every extruded bit of hackwork that was relentlessly ground out by Asimov and the three "Killer B"s in the '80s and beyond. Kingsbury’s book is set after the 1000 Years of chaos is over and the Second Empire is in full glory and looks at what a future extrapolated from Asimov’s original vision would have looked like)[/li][/ul]
And with the robot novels, the correct order is
[ul]
[li]The Caves of Steel[/li][li]The Naked Sun[/li][li]The Robots of Dawn (maybe…it’s not really all that bad and has a number of redeming qualities, unlike any later books in the series.)[/li][/ul]
IMO, Robots and Empire is an Oedipus book (“It’s better to gouge your eyes out than read it” 
)
Not that I have any opinions on the matter or anything.
He tried to tie in the Lucky Starr books? Jinkies! How so? Admittedly I have not read those books since I was a kid (like alot of people Lucky Starr was the first taste of Asimov I ever had).
I think Chronos might have been referring only to the fact that some of–. well, one of them, “Lucky starr and the moons of jupiter”, has a robot character, and much discussion of the three laws of robotics. Maybe some of the books have other robots… I haven’t found copies of ‘big sun’ (mercury) or ‘rings’ (saturn.)
Both …And the Moons of Jupiter and …And the Rings of Saturn (the last two of the six) feature positronic robots which follow the Three Laws (the Paul French cover was completely and openly blown, by this point). There’s no mention of U. S. Robots or Susan Calvin, but then, there’s no mention of them in the Lije Bailey books, either. Although the Lije Bailey books do have a few other ties to I, Robot, such as the vulnerability of positronic brains to gamma radiation and the Handbook of Robotics (I once leapt out of a burning building with nothing but the Handbook and a pair of shorts, and in a pinch, I would have skipped the shorts :)).
So anyway, the Lucky Starr books aren’t tightly tied in, but they are tied in.
Actually, there was a very clear callback to Susan Calvin and the short story “liar” in “The Robots of Dawn”, the third Lije Baley book. Partly as a clue, to the faithful reader, of the ultimate mystery of the book…
Since the Susan Calvin story referenced, ‘liar’ was about a robot who could read and adjust minds, it could definitely be seen as a clue that the killer of Jander was also a mentalic robot - namely Giskard. Subconsciously, Fastolfe suspected Giskard’s unusual abilities, which is why he told the susan calvin story to Lije.
On the other hand, Fastolfe said that the tale of the lying robot was total fabrication, and maybe, in the Lije Baley framework, it was. He mentioned that stories about Susan Calvin were common among Aurorans, though they never seem to think of her as an earthwoman by birth.