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Page 119
To the Darwinian theorem of human adaptability, SF writers added an important corollary: rational choice. Unlike the other species, humans can understand the evolutionary process and their own adaptations to new conditions, and choose to behave in other ways than those for which they have been conditioned. Baley, for instance, must confront and conquer his neuroses in order, first, to solve Sarton's murder, second, Delmarre's murder, and third, the problem of Earthmen becoming spacemen, as well as the proper relationship between humans and machines, C/Fe.
In his memoirs Asimov traced his reluctance to proceed with the third volume of the Robot Novels trilogy to his intention to have a woman fall in love with a humaniform robot such as R. Daneel Olivaw, and he could see "no way in 1958 of being able to handle it, and as I wrote the eight chapters [not four, as he stated in The Rest of the Robots] I grew more and more frightened of the necessity of describing the situation." Eventually The Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire would be published in 1983 and 1985, creating not a trilogy but a tetralogy, and The Robots of Dawn made the bestseller lists, like Foundation's Edge, but they will be discussed in Chapter 8.

 
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