by James Gunn
To list the links is not to say that these were the motivations behind the 1980s novels, only that they helped Asimov organize them and perhaps even provided motivation that kept him writing. In addition, these aspects of Asimov's work provide a context in which the developments in the novels may be considered.
Take Robots and Empire, for example. It begins 200 years after the events of The Robots of Dawn and 164 years after Elijah Baley's death on Baleyworld (named not for himself but for his son, Ben, the first Earth settler on an extraterrestrial planet after the settlement of the Spacer worlds). Gladia is 233 but still youthful and beautiful; her marriage to Santarix Gremionus, which had produced a son and a daughter, had long ago been dissolved, as had her relationship with her children. Amadiro, the antagonist of The Robots of Dawn, is aging but still plotting to make Spacers, assisted by preparations made by humaniform robots, the settlers of the Galaxy rather than Earthmen. He now is aided by ambitious, young Levular Mandamus, who is a fifth-generation descendant of Gladia. Han Fastolfe has died and left Daneel and Giskard to Gladia, whom he has treated like his own, beloved daughter; better, in fact, because his real daughter, Vasilia Aliena, who had been tended by Giskard as a child and programmed him with a lost design that turned out to give him his unusual powers, is bitterly estranged and determined to regain possession of Giskard.
The situation becomes unsettled by the arrival of D.G. Baley, a trader from Baleyworld, who turns out to be a seventh-generation descendant of Elijah, named for Daneel and Giskard. He reveals that not only is Solaria apparently deserted, leaving millions of robots behind to be salvaged and perhaps sold to other Spacer worlds, but that two Settler ships have landed on Solaria and have been destroyed. He wants Gladia to accompany him to Solaria, since she is the only native Solarian available, even though she left there two centuries before.
After some reluctance, Gladia agrees to go, accompanied by Daneel and Giskard. On Solaria, they find no Solarians (where they have gone is a mystery unresolved by the end of the novel, although an answer may be available in Foundation and Earth) but plenty of robots, including a humaniform robot who thinks none of them is human except Gladia, since only those who speak with a Solarian accent seem to be defined as human. Gladia helps save the party and D.G. confiscates the weapon prepared for their destruction, a nuclear intensifier, which intensifies the weak nuclear reaction and causes a violent explosion in fusion reactors.
D.G.'s party returns to Baleyworld with the valuable nuclear intensifier, the first one made portable enough to be used aboard a spaceship. On the relatively primitive Baleyworld, Gladia is treated as a heroine and expected to give a speech. To her surprise, she responds in a way that startles her and electrifies her audience, both the Baleyworld legislature and the widespread hyperwave viewers, as she pleads for human brotherhood and understanding.
Meanwhile on Aurora, Mandamus has won preferment from Amadiro with a plan to destroy Earth and thus win the Galaxy for the Spacers (and revenge for Amadiro). And Vasilia, returning to Aurora after Fastolfe's death, figures out that Giskard can detect and influence human emotions and persuades Amadiro to demand Gladia's return from the Settlers in order to get back Giskard.
Gladia, on Aurora, reports to Auroran authorities by holovision from Amadiro's office, and then falls asleep on the couch before Vasilia enters to take control of Giskard. Daneel helps Giskard fight off Vasilia's expert orders by citing the "Zeroth Law of Robotics," which he has just deduced from Baley's deathbed speech. The Zeroth Law places humanity as a whole above any single human, and would restate the First Law as "A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm, unless this would violate the Zeroth Law of Robotics." In the end Giskard acts against Vasilia and her robots, and eliminates their memories.
Gladia and her robots flee with D.G. to Earth, which Settlers consider holy. Daneel suspects that Amadiro and Mandamus have plans against Earth that may soon come to fruition, perhaps using a version of the nuclear intensifier. He cannot understand how it can be used on a planet without fusion plants until he learns that Earth, because of its uniquely oversized moon, has large deposits of uranium and thorium in its crust, and the nuclear intensifier can enhance fission, as well as fusion, but more slowly. If it were used, the Earth's radiation would slowly increase, and the increase in temperature and mutations would make Earth gradually uninhabitable.
Through a clue murmured by a dying humaniform robot that had attempted to destroy Giskard, Daneel and Giskard track Amadiro and Mandamus to the ruins of Three Mile Island just as the humans are arguing about how long the fission enhancement should take: Amadiro, for a decade so that he can obtain revenge within his lifetime; Mandamus, for a century or more, so that the process will be undetectable and more effective in securing Spacer supremacy. They are stopped and caused to forget but not before Giskard allows Mandamus to push the button to start an irreversible reaction in the Earth's crust. It is necessary to make Earth uninhabitable so that the dangerous mystique surrounding Earth be destroyed and that Settlers be set free to "streak outward" and "establish a Galactic Empire." The inner conflict of his actions, however, destroys Giskard, but not before he passes his abilities along to Daneel along with the duty to protect D.G. and Gladia, who have become lovers, to help supervise the removal of Earthpeople from their world, and to find out where the Solarians have gone.
The last item would seem to leave room for a sequel. "It is my custom to try to leave one loose and untied matter at the end of a novel, in the very likely case that I would want to continue the story," he wrote in his memoir. But in the case of the Solarians, he never did so unless the episode in Foundation and Earth provided the necessary tidying up.
Robots and Empire works well enough, and for my tastes better than the Foundation sequels. The reason may be the reflected glow of the earlier Robot novels, or it may be that the novel still contains an element of self-doubt and individual development on the part of Gladia and even Daneel and Giskard. But, though the moment when Gladia faces the Baleyworld legislature emulates Baley's conquest of his agoraphobia and is an emotional high point, her conquest of self is peripheral to the theme of the novel. And Giskard's magical ability to influence emotions undercuts all such character developments
Even though Asimov told himself that Daneel was the real hero of the Robot novels, the moments that contain the most effective drama are the flashbacks to a meeting in space between Gladia and Baley, when he is en route to Baleyworld, and the meeting between Daneel and Baley, on Baleyworld, as Baley, who is dying and attempting to ease Daneel's internal conflicts says, in words that later help Daneel develop the Zeroth Law (and may reflect Asimov's own epitaph):
"My death, Daneel," he said, "is not important. No individual death among human beings is important. Someone who dies leaves his work behind and that does not entirely die. It never entirely dies as long as humanity exists. . . .
"The work of each individual contributes to a totality and so becomes an undying part of the totality. That totality of human lives past and present and to come forms a tapestry that has been in existence now for many tens of thousands of years and has been growing more elaborate and, on the whole, more beautiful in all that time. . . . An individual life is one thread in the tapestry and what is one thread compared to the whole?
"Daneel, keep your mind fixed firmly on the tapestry and do not let the trailing off of a single thread affect you. There are so many other threads, each valuable, each contributing"
Other moments in the novel stand out. Further comments about the "Laws of Humanics" remind readers that humans are governed in the same way robots are, though the laws, necessary to the development of psychohistory, are more difficult to discover. Daneel and Giskard, in their conversations with humans, often resemble nothing so much as traditional English butlers not an unlikely comparison, since both are considered to be perfect servants. The novel also contains some well-wrought Asimov contrasts: humans have intuitions
robots have only reason; Aurorans are anti-Earth Earthmen are anti-robot. In addition, the Spacer longevity and susceptibility to disease, because of their existence sheltered from heat, cold, deprivation, and bacteria, reflect H. G. Wells's Martians, as if to comment that the Martians should have taken greater precautions against Earth's germs, such as the Spacers' nose plugs and gloves. At one point (when challenged by Vasilia), touchingly, Giskard is swayed to action by his feeling, like Baley's, for Daneel's humanity, and in an exchange reminiscent of that in "That Thou Art Mindful of Him," both concede humanity to the other.
Ultimately, however, Robots and Empire is devoted to problem solving, and as good as Asimov was with what became the central issue of the Foundation stories, Elijah Baley's character development makes for superior fiction and his viewpoint, a better controlling method. Maybe Asimov's decision to bring his two series into consistency was an artistic mistake.
Foundation and Earth, published in 1986, brought the Asimov future history to its most distant point in time. It picks up the story of Golan Trevise and Janov Pelorat, along with the Gaian Bliss, immediately after the end of Foundation's Edge, as they set out to find Earth. Like The Foundation Trilogy stories, the solution to the problem at the heart of Foundation's Edge represents the problem for Foundation and Earth: why did Trevise decide for Gaia? The solution, he thinks, can only lie on Earth, but all memory of Earth has been removed from the old Imperial Library preserved on Trantor by the Second Foundation, and even from Gaia itself. Trevise's search takes him first to Comporellon, which was founded according to legend in the first millennium of hyperspatial travel, remembers a legendary founder named Benbally, and may once have been called Benbally World (clearly, Ben Baley and Baleyworld).
On Comporellon, Trevise becomes involved with the Minister of Transportation, Mitza Lizalor, and his group is allowed to escape with its ship and information about another group of mysterious worlds called the "Spacer Worlds" or the "Forbidden Worlds." They set forth some possibly mythical spatial coordinates for three Spacer worlds and land on Aurora.
Aurora is deserted except for packs of feral dogs. Trevise is attacked but drives them off, at Bliss's suggestion, with his neuronic whip. The second Spacer world is Solaria, where the Solarians are found underground, extensively mutated to be hermaphroditic and equipped with brain lobes bulging behind each ear that convert heat flow into mechanical energy for all the robots and other machines on the estate. They learn about the deserted Spacer Worlds from Bander, the one they encounter, who knows and cares nothing about Earth but is about to destroy them before Bliss interferes and in the process kills Bander.
They rescue Bander's immature child Fallom and move on to the third set of coordinates, which leads them to a deserted, inhospitable planet named Melpomenia, where they find book films and a dangerous kind of moss (like "Green Patches"), as well as coordinates of the other 47 Spacer worlds. Pelorat suggests they look at the center of the sphere the 50 Spacer worlds make and locate a world named Alpha.
Alpha turns out to be an arcadian utopia, which feeds and entertains them, including a sexual interlude with a beautiful Asian woman named Hiroko for Trevise, who hears from one old man legends of a radioactive Earth and gets a description of the slow abandonment of Earth as well as a description of the Sixties from Pebble in the Sky. The Galactic Empire tried to replace the radioactive soil without success and finally transplanted the remaining humans to Alpha (which is Alpha Centauri). But in keeping with Bliss's theory that isolated worlds all turn dangerous and deadly, Hiroko warns them that they must escape before the deadly virus with which Trevise was deliberately infected during intercourse is activated when the men return from fishing.
Trevise's spaceship heads for a star system only a parsec or so from Alpha and at last finds Earth, fatally radioactive and lifeless. Finally, however, Trevise decides that the secret must lie on Earth's moon and there, in an artificial cavern, discovers Daneel. Daneel describes what he has been doing over the past 20,000 years to pursue the Zeroth Law and protect humanity, including the founding of Gaia and the start of Galaxia. He also reveals that he is dying. He has been totally replaced a number of times over the years, but the increasing complexity and storage capacity of his brain has reached the limits of uncertainty. He will die before Galaxia can be achieved.
Trevise confirms his choice of Galaxia on the basis of his discovery of a third and unstated axiom on which Seldon's Plan was based: there are other galaxies that may contain other, alien intelligences, and the human Galaxy must be united as one in order not to be fighting among its various parts when aliens from other galaxies invade. And Daneel will gain three or four more centuries of existence to bring Galaxia into being by merging his mind with that of the hermaphroditic Solarian child, Fallom.
Foundation and Earth was Asimov's Odyssey, with Trevise and his crew experiencing the mysteries of the Galaxy and escaping its perils as they try to return (to the ancestral human) home, and Daneel as Penelope. Daneel has no suitors, of course (unless the leaders of the First and Second Foundation, already rejected, can be considered for that role), and the fanciful parallel breaks down in other ways. The novel, divided into seven parts for each of the seven worlds they visit, is as episodic as the Odyssey, however, and attempts the same epic cultural justification, in this case the humanization of the Galaxy. In it we can see laid out all the science-fiction virtues: intelligence, cooperation, problem-solving, and concern for future generations and humanity itself, as it fulfills Jack Williamson's definition of space opera: "the expression of a mythic theme of human expansion against an unknown and commonly hostile frontier."
The novel is not a major addition to the Asimov canon, but it fulfills its major purpose of answering most of the questions that Asimov readers have accumulated about the Foundation universe, and it ends with an appropriately grand climax, the expansion of the human struggle beyond the Galaxy into the universe. Perhaps this was "the loose and untied matter" that Asimov had left in case he wanted to return, to write his Iliad, or it may have been the existence of Fallom, whose unfathomable eyes were resting on Trevise as he said, "It is not as if we had the enemy already here and among us." But five years later, Asimov wrote in his memoir, he still "had no idea how those complications could be handled." He never did.
Between the completion of Robots and Empire and the start of Foundation and Earth, Asimov contracted with the William Morris Literary Agency to write Fantastic Voyage II, in anticipation that it would become a motion picture. Like Fantastic Voyage, it would deal with the use of miniaturized vessels in the human bloodstream. But that project foundered over his stipulation that Doubleday have an opportunity to bid on its publication and then over his reluctance to proceed when Doubleday executives objected. The Agency turned to Philip José Farmer as a replacement, but didn't like his manuscript, although Asimov found it "terrific" and faithful to the Agency outline.
In part because of his reluctance to continue with the Foundation future, Asimov finally agreed to write the novel, which brought cooperating Russians and Americans together on one vessel, after the Agency agreed to pay Farmer for an accepted novel and to allow Doubleday to publish Asimov's novel. The novel was published in 1987. Asimov didn't think it did as well because of the Russian-American cooperation (in spite of its prescience). As Asimov had anticipated, the movie was never made.
Asimov liked to analyze his actions and trace his ideas to their origins. His next novel, he wrote in his memoir, came about when a young man riding in his apartment elevator commented that he had always wanted to know what had happened to Hari Seldon and how he had come to invent psychohistory. For two of his last three books Asimov would devote himself to those discoveries.
The first was Prelude to Foundation, which he began on February 12, 1987 and completed nine months later. It was published later that year. The novel begins fifty years before the events narrated in the first chapter of The Foundation Trilogy and traces the beginnings of psychohistory as Har
i Seldon announces it as a theoretical possibility in a paper read at the Decennial Convention of mathematicians on Trantor, his first visit there from his obscure home planet of Helicon.
The Empire's First Minister, Eto Demerzel (another example of Asimov's belief that power lies behind the throne), encourages the Emperor, Cleon I, to meet with Seldon to explore the possibility of perfecting psychohistory into a practical discipline. Seldon, outlining all the difficulties, thinks the task is impossible and wants to return home. But he is prevented from doing so by an attack by two young hoodlums.
Although Seldon is an expert in a variety of martial art called ''twisting," he also is aided by a nearby stranger who introduces himself as journalist Chetter Hummin and warns him about Demerzel, who he thinks is behind the attack. He also urges Seldon to conceal himself on Trantor from Demerzel and the Emperor's efforts to get control of psychohistory, while Seldon himself gathers information on whether it can indeed be developed into a predictive science, which Hummin says is desperately needed to prevent the Galaxy from plunging into millennia of anarchy after the fall of the Empire, whose decay can be seen everywhere.
