Robots and Empire

Robots and Empire is a 1985 science fiction novel by American writer Isaac Asimov, released by Doubleday Books. The book is part of Asimov’s effort to merge his three major story cycles—the Robot series, the Galactic Empire series, and the Foundation series—into one continuous future history. (He did the same in *Foundation’s Edge* and its sequel.) The novel shows the shift from the earlier Milky Way, where humans and positronic robots coexist, to the later Galactic Empire. In the earlier Robot trilogy, the galaxy is dominated by the fifty “Spacer” worlds, which blend human and robot societies near Earth. Earth is densely populated, but whether its billions exceed the total population of all Spacer worlds combined is not definitively established in canon—each Spacer world has tens of millions of inhabitants. Spacers look down on Earthlings and treat them as nearly subhuman, forbidding their immigration for a long time. In Asimov’s later Galactic Empire, however, the galaxy holds quadrillions of humans across hundreds of thousands of habitable planets, with very few robots—only figures like R. Daneel Olivaw remain, and the knowledge to maintain or upgrade robots is largely lost or forgotten, not preserved on a few remote worlds. This novel thus explains how the earlier Robot series connects to the Galactic Empire series.

**Plot summary** Two centuries after the death of Earthman Elijah Baley (the detective from earlier Robot books), Earth’s people have overcome their agoraphobia and resumed space colonization using faster-than-light drive, reaching planets beyond the old Spacer worlds. These colonists call themselves “Settlers” and revere Earth as their mother world. Baley’s memory lives on in Gladia Delmarre, a long-lived Spacer who moved from Solaria to Aurora. Solaria, the 50th Spacer world, is now empty of humans, though millions of robot servants remain. A seventh-generation descendant of Baley’s, Daneel Giskard (“D.G.”) Baley, asks Gladia to help him visit Solaria to investigate the destruction of several Settler spaceships that landed there and to capture the unattended robots. Gladia is accompanied by the positronic robots R. Daneel Olivaw and R. Giskard Reventlov, both bequeathed to her by their creator, Dr. Han Fastolfe. R. Giskard has secret telepathic powers known only to R. Daneel.