One of the flaws of the established Asimov is that his story and his characters can suffer from an overweening tendency toward philosophical explaining, as if success stimulated an over confidence, as it did with Wells also, in my opinion. In particular, his use of his famous laws of robotics and the role they play in a 'murder'. The enclosed city and its moving walkways hark back to H G Wells, but the main theme of the novel, the social and evolutionary aspects of the introduction of robots, is all Asimov’s own. One of the best of Asimov’s considerable body of work. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. The Spacers and Settlers were separate groups who, we presume, fought each other savagely.We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice. The Spacer Worlds weren't the nucleus of the Trantorian Empire, they were a first diaspora which was overtaken by the later Settler wave. It would be silly to assign each character in the story a historical figure from 1776.Īnother thing I forgot to mention before is that he makes a tie-in (or perhaps more accurately, an Easter Egg) to his Galactic Empire series at the end but that reference doesn't make sense in the way he later merged his sagas in the 1980s. I don't want to overdo the analogy, as Benford wrote in the epilogue to his own Foundation book you would then start looking for more and more parallels that probably aren't intended even by the author. If you count Aurora as Washington DC, the number of other Spacer Worlds is identical to the number of states at the time the story was written in the 1940s, though of course there were only thirteen at the time of independence in 1776.

It seems to me that Earth is the 'Great Britain' of the story, and the 49 Outer Worlds are the 'United States of America' becoming independent to it.

Asimov the caves of steel