Robots and Empire review

Yet another month has passed between book completions, although in my defense I did not get a copy of Robots and Empire until mid-December and it’s a longer book than the previous three.

Many of the characters from The Robots of Dawn make return appearances in this novel, but our hero Elijah Baley is no more, having lived his short Earthman lifespan while the Spacers and robots from the previous novel continue their much-longer existences. The robots Daneel and Giskard have center stage here and are the most thoughtfully and completely fleshed out (irony intended). Asimov imbues them with more humanity this time; they have evolved their thinking about themselves and of their human ‘masters.’ I feel that this is somehow inconsistent with past descriptions of how robot positronic ‘brains’ function, despite other clear indications that they can be re-programmed. I’ll have to go back to I, Robot to see if there is anything about how set in metal are their characteristics and capabilities. Regardless of what’s come before, though, Asimov has decided that flexibility is a necessity, for both humans and robots.

Other characters are less interesting. Is Amadiro really harboring a 200-year old grudge that drives his every action and decision? Perhaps it’s the only thing that keeps him going, as Lady Gladia relates how difficult the centuries of life can be as they turn to tedium and boredom for many Spacers. As for the plot and pacing, though, I very much enjoyed the movement from planet to planet as an organizing principle, as the protagonists move from one piece of the puzzle to the next as they leap through hyperspace from Aurora to Solaria to Baleyword and finally to Earth.

Mid-way through the book, I found myself wondering about the underlying philosophy that galactic expansion is ultimately the only path forward for humanity. Is stagnation the only other option? What about developing better and more dynamic societies and capabilities on the planets they have already colonized? Could there be a better balance between Earth’s caves of steel and Solaria’s inhuman isolation? I see parallels to this in the very real struggles we have on this Earth with respect to our economy. It’s taken as a given that economic expansion is a desirable outcome, but as I wrote in a letter to The New Yorker many years ago, this has certainly not reduced the number of humans who live poor, short, and difficult lives. Wouldn’t solving those problems be a worthy goal?

Looking ahead, several changes to this project are forthcoming. First, I’ve started reading the next book--The Currents of Space--on my new Kindle. My lovely wife gave it to me for my birthday a few weeks ago, pre-loaded with several of the upcoming books in the series! I’m going to experiment with keeping notes on the book in the Kindle as I read, although I’m already feeling that my patience for clicking through the virtual keyboard to pick out a few words is wearing thin; my basic model has neither a physical keyboard nor a touch screen. I have also turned on the feature where it highlights passages that have been highlighted by many other readers, but I don’t see any of these yet; there may not be enough folks reading old Asimov novels on Kindle for this to be meaningful.

The second change is that I have not previously read these next three books, although I think I began at least one of them many years ago. On top of that, the Galactic Empire novels, as they are known, take place in reverse order from which they were written. As I read forward in Foundation time, I’ll be going backwards in the writer’s output and, possibly, his thought-process about the whole story arc. Should be interesting!