A review of this — 49 weeks ago
It took me a while to figure out what book to read next after the main Robots books, but finally I decided on Robots and Empire, which was pretty much the right one. It ties in very well with the Foundation series, showing how psychohistory got its start in the mind of the robot Giskard.
It’s a really long book, it got a bit draggy at times but overall it was interesting. Plotwise, Gladia teams up with Elijah Baley’s descendant D.G. Baley to figure out what happened to the abandoned planet Solaria, and later makes it her mission to draw Spacers and Settlers closer together – for Elijah Baley’s dream has come true, and Earthmen have expanded into the Galaxy, breaking the Spacer monopoly. Her robots, Daneel and Giskard, uncover a plot to destroy Earth, and go about rescuing it.
But the more interesting part is not the plot but the tie-in to Foundation (in my mind). Giskard is a mind-reading robot, it is revealed in Robots of Dawn, and he has been trying to work out the Laws of Humanics – the laws that govern human behaviour, the human equivalent of the Three Laws of Robotics. But he has failed so far in his quest for ‘psychohistory’. Finally through various experiences he comes to realise that you cannot predict the behaviour of any single human being, but you can analyse and affect the behaviour of human beings in aggregate.
That realisation sets the stage for psychohistory to be born millennia later, long after the events of this book, in which Daneel plays a part. But just as interesting, it leads the two robots to postulate the existence of a Zeroth Law: that for robots, to guard the existence of humanity as a whole may override their programming to protect the existence of specific humans.
Daneel and Giskard are the stars of the show. As they reason things out – Daneel very much like a human being, after he emulates the thinking processes of his now late partner Elijah Baley – they alter their own programming and become kinda human, to the point of expressing “love” for each other by holding hands. Aww, how cute.
There’s one thing that still puzzles me, though. In the Foundation series, it’s mentioned that “Danee and Balee” were considered the saviours of humankind in the distant past. But it seems to me that Elijah Baley and Daneel’s adventures in the first three books don’t really qualify as saving mankind. Baley might be considered a pioneer in pushing Earthmen to conquer the galaxy, but Daneel wasn’t a partner in that. And in this book, D.G. Baley and Daneel hardly work together at all. Hmmm.
Anyway, I realised that I missed out one Foundation book – Foundation and Earth – which probably ties in really closely with this one. I’m going to read that next and then take a break from Asimov. I still stand by my earlier comments. Foundation was more mind-expanding for me and so I like it better. The first three Robots books were a bit more like mystery novels, which was interesting, and I know many people who consider these books Asimov’s best work, but Foundation still takes the cake for me.
