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In Robots and Empire Asimov wanted to achieve three links between his two great concepts: |
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1) to explain why the galactic empire was created by immigrants from Earth and not from the fifty Spacer worlds; |
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2) to explain the absence of robots in the Foundation stories; |
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3) to explain the radioactivity of Earth depicted in Pebble in the Sky. |
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In the process he wanted to lay the groundwork for how Earth came to be forgotten as the birthplace of humanity and how psychohistory came to be developed (an explanation already begun in The Robots of Dawn) as well as to make more plausible how humanity survived the many crises ahead that might have destroyed it, or space travel, before the galactic empire could be achieved. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 |
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