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Page 210
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"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. . . .
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"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?
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"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

 
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