Robots and Empire

Robots and Empire is a science fiction novel by the American author Isaac Asimov, published by Doubleday Books in 1985. It is part of Asimov's Robot series, which consists of many short stories (collected in I, Robot, The Rest of the Robots, The Complete Robot, Robot Dreams, Robot Visions, and Gold) and five novels (including The Positronic Man, The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, and The Robots of Dawn). Robots and Empire is part of Asimov's consolidation of his three major series of science fiction stories and novels into a single future history: his Robot series, his Galactic Empire series and his Foundation series. (Asimov also carried out this unification in Foundation's Edge and its sequel.) In the novel, Asimov depicts the transition from his earlier Milky Way Galaxy, inhabited by both human beings and positronic robots, to his Galactic Empire. The galaxy of his earlier trilogy of Robot novels is dominated by the blended human/robotic societies of the fifty "Spacer" planets, dispersed through the near-Earth part of the Galaxy. While the Earth is much more populous than all of the Spacer planets combined, its people are looked down upon and treated almost as sub-human by the Spacers. For a long time, the Spacers have forbidden immigration of people from the Earth. But Asimov's later Galactic Empire is populated by many quadrillions of human beings on hundreds of thousands of habitable planets and by very few robots (such as R. Daneel Olivaw). Even the technology to maintain and upgrade robots exists on only a few out-of-the-way planets. Therefore, this novel attempts to describe how his earlier Robot series ultimately connects to his Galactic Empire series.