by James Gunn
One reason I find The Robots of Dawn superior to Foundation's Edge is that the situation of the Robot novels automatically leads to more satisfying fiction. The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun are better novels to me (and to Asimov, as well, who in his autobiography calls what he was writing in 1953 and the years immediately following and specifically The Caves of Steel his "peak period") because they are more concerned with character, and his characters are more like real people than the functional rationalists of his other work and perform in settings that are more like real places than the bare stage on which his other characters acted out their dramas. Because of their subjects, the Robot novels are works concerned with character, and character highly influenced by environment, at that; in addition Asimov chooses to tell his Robot novels through a flawed viewpoint character who must not only solve problems but change in the process. Fiction developed around these kinds of concerns is likely to be more rounded and more pleasing, and The Robots of Dawn shares the qualities of its predecessors.
The first two Robot novels, like their sequel, focus on the psychological problems and rational investigations of Elijah (Lije) Baley, the civil-service detective of a greater New York City that has developed three thousand years in the future. The cities of Earth have roofed themselves over, and the crowded people of Earth have become so accustomed to the feeling of enclosure that they cannot venture outside without feelings of agoraphobia. Meanwhile, earlier generations have colonized fifty nearby planets, and their descendants have changed into Spacers: long-lived, disease-free, dependent on robots, and in control of their birth processes in quality as well as quantity. Spacers differ in their social relationships and dependence on robots, but they are more like each other than like Earthmen, whom they detest and consider an inferior species.
In The Caves of Steel Baley must solve the murder of a Spacer before it is solved by a Spacer robot named R. Daneel Olivaw, who is assigned to Baley as a partner. In The Naked Sun Baley must solve the murder of a Spacer on Solaria, a planet that has carried reaction to Earth's crowded warrens to the opposite extreme: Solarians live on vast estates surrounded by robots, seldom come into personal contact with each other, and reproduce through laboratory techniques (even contact with spouses is not pleasant). On Solaria Baley's agoraphobia meets the Solarians' claustrophobia, and must cope with the planet's vast open spaces. There, also, Baley meets Gladia Delmarre, the beautiful wife of the victim, who turns out to be the unwitting instrument of her husband's death. Each feels an attraction for the other that neither can acknowledge.
The Robots of Dawn picks up where The Naked Sun leaves off. Baley has returned to Earth convinced that Earthmen must conquer their agoraphobia and colonize the Galaxy, as Han Fastolfe, Daneel's creator, had advocated in The Caves of Steel. The Spacers are too comfortable to endure the necessary hardships and too long-lived to risk their lives in such dangerous pursuits. Baley, at forty-five, is to old to go, he believes, but perhaps his son, Ben, will. As the novel opens, Baley and Ben and a small group of like-minded Earth people are practicing survival techniques in the open near New York when Baley receives an urgent summons. He must go to Aurora and solve a mystery. This time it is not a murder: a robot has been incapacitated, its mind totally destroyed by being placed into a condition called ''roblock." The question of what to call this crime receives considerable discussion in the early pages of the novel; it is not homicide, and the term roboticide is awkward. Eventually Baley calls it murder, because the robot is not just any mechanical creature; it has been manufactured by Fastolfe, the leading roboticist in the inhabited Galaxy, as a twin to Daneel.
Like the other mysteries Baley has solved, this one is a variety of the "locked-room puzzle" that Asimov enjoys (in his memoir he wrote, "[It] was essentially a murder mystery, and I am particularly comfortable with mysteries"). Only Fastolfe has the knowledge to have placed the robot into "roblock," but Fastolfe denies doing so, suggesting instead that it must have occurred as a chance one-in-a-billion "mental freeze-out." He has a motive, moreover, that relates to Baley's interests: he still believes that Earthmen should colonize the Galaxy; his opponents on Aurora think that Spacers, particularly Aurorans, should do so, but since they would have difficulty leaving Aurora, humaniform robots like Daneel and Jander Panell, as the murdered robot is named, should be built to precede them to planets intended for colonization and prepare them for Auroran migration when they have been made as comfortable as Aurora. Fastolfe doesn't think this would work, and Baley agrees; but unless Baley proves that Fastolfe did not incapacitate Jander as a means of demonstrating the fallibility of the design, Fastolfe's political opponents are likely to win. Because of his earlier successes, Baley's help has been requested by Fastolfe and by the Auroran government.
Baley's predicament is made even more difficult by the fact that if he fails, Earth will see that the blame falls on him, not on Earth, and he will return in disgrace. In addition, once he gets to Aurora, he discovers that the murdered robot had been loaned by Fastolfe to a neighbor. That neighbor turns out to be Gladia Delmarre, who had left Solaria and come to Aurora to get away from her unpleasant memories and, she confesses to Baley, to find the physical pleasures of sex that her brief contact with Baley had led her to believe she might experience. Now Gladia herself is once more a suspect.
Gladia's situation allows Asimov to set up another of the contrasts that he seems to enjoy and that, for the reader, lends psychological depth to his observations. On Solaria, personal contact is so repugnant to normal Solarians that sex is infrequent and unpleasant. On Aurora sex is so commonplace and so divorced from love and affection that Gladia found it boring. Finally she turned to her humaniform robot (in his memoir, Asimov wrote that inability to deal with that situation had stopped his work on the novel in 1958) and found in him the ideal mate until his irreversible freeze-out.
In spite of the similarity between the styles and substance of the earlier Robot novels and their recent sequel, the differences in the treatment of sex alone indicates how much the times (and Asimov) have changed. In The Naked Sun Asimov had to make do with the removal of a glove and a touch on the cheek. In The Robots of Dawn Gladia not only discusses with Baley the pleasures of sex and confesses to taking Jander as her lover and even looking upon him as her husband, she spends a night of passion with Baley. Baley, in his examination of Jander's mindless body, discovers that the robot has all the necessary human equipment (and of course, later on, discovers the same thing about Gladia).
Other changes had been created by the passing of the years and the events of the early 1980s. Asimov approached the task of writing his Robot novels sequel in a different frame of mind than he approached the writing of The Caves of Steel or The Naked Sun or even Foundation's Edge. While he was writing The Caves of Steel, he was trying to please Horace Gold, the demanding editor of Galaxy who had suggested the idea to him, and Walter Bradbury, the editor at Doubleday who had published his first novel and had "copiously red-penciled" his second and shepherded him through several more, including the juvenile novels he was writing under the name of Paul French. As a consequence, he wrote in his autobiography that his writing had become "more direct and spare."
The one thing that one cannot say about The Robots of Dawn is that the writing is direct and spare. The Robots of Dawn sprawls over 419 pages while The Caves of Steel requires only 202 and The Naked Sun only 195. The third volume in the trilogy is longer than the first two volumes combined, and the third volume contains no more action than either of the others, and perhaps not as much. What occupies the extra space is dialogue, lots of it; it goes on and on. It is good dialogue, because Asimov has something to say, and he cannot write uninterestingly; and the formal mystery proceeds, traditionally and necessarily, by question and answer. In this particular situation, with Baley in an environment that is entirely new and exploring a technology and a culture not only alien to him but that must be laid out for the reader, many questions must be asked and answered that deal with
matters beyond the actual investigation. Nevertheless, even though the novel reads well and the dialogue carries the story forward tensely (and surprisingly) enough, it does not come up to the balance of integrated dialogue and action, reflection and movement, that is characteristic of the first two novels. It is not "direct and spare."
Why it is not presents an interesting question. To be sure, Asimov makes the novel perform more than one function: integrating the robot universe and the Foundation universe takes space, not only for details but for theme, and in this respect Stableford was right insofar as the integration process does not coincide with the principal purpose of the novel it detracts from it. The novel is driven by Asimov's efforts to bring his novels into one consistent body of work. It contains numerous references to I, Robot, which is referred to as "legends" that have clustered around Susan Calvin, considered as one of the early pioneers in robotics. Particular reference is made to "Liar!" and less specific references to other stories, such as "Little Lost Robot," "Evidence,'' and "The Evitable Conflict," and, outside that book, "The Bicentennial Man." But not, oddly enough, to "Satisfaction Guaranteed," which duplicates the situation of Gladia and Jander, or "That Thou Art Mindful of Him," which foreshadows one possible outcome of humaniform colonization of the Galaxy. Fastolfe discusses two other matters of consequence to the unification process: the effort by Aurorans "to produce a planet which, taken as a whole, would obey the Three Laws of Robotics," a possible foreshadowing of Gaia in Foundation's Edge (and perhaps of "Galaxia"); and of his desire to discover the Laws of Humanics. "I dream sometimes," he says, "of founding a mathematical science which I think of as `psychohistory,' . . ."
If it had not been for Asimov's desire to bring all of his novels into a general future history, The Robots of Dawn might not have been written. It certainly would not have been the same book. In order for the Robot novels to logically precede the Foundation stories, Asimov had to provide a logical reason why the Foundation Galaxy has no robots in it; for good measure, Asimov threw in the creation of psychohistory. In less skillful hands, these concerns might have turned the novel into a sterile exercise, but Asimov's greatest virtue as a science-fiction writer was his ingenuity, and it did not desert him here. The integration process is embedded in the mystery, and its resolution is the mystery's resolution. In a classic summation scene reminiscent of the conclusion of The Naked Sun (and a thousand formal mystery novels), Baley forces roboticist Kelden Amadiro, Fastolfe's rival in many things, including the settlement of the Galaxy, to admit that he has been in contact with Jander in an effort to learn how to construct humaniform robots and might have contributed to Jander's condition. But, as it turns out, as in The Naked Sun another being entirely is guilty; when Baley deduces that Giskard, an older, non-humaniform robot, can detect and influence human emotions (like the Mule) he also understands that Giskard must have learned of Amadiro's questioning of Jander and destroyed Jander's mind in order to protect Fastolfe. But Giskard's secret cannot be revealed, for the sake of Fastolfe and humanity.
In fact, the early weakness of the novel the inadequacy of the reasons for sending Baley to Aurora that disturbs the reader as much as Baley is so cleverly explained in the final scene that the weakness becomes a strength. Giskard also allowed his master to be suspected so that Baley would be sent for and Giskard could study his Earthman reactions to the possibility of space settlement, which Giskard now believes is possible. All of this Baley accomplishes in a remarkable three days.
Other reasons for the novel's length may be similar to those that lengthened the novels of Henry James: as he got older, his thoughts became more convoluted, and what once seemed simple became more complex; in addition, both writers adopted new writing methods (James began to dictate his novels to a stenographer; Asimov had gone to a computer's word-processing, although he always wrote his first drafts on his typewriter) that minimized the effort of getting words into fictional order. Still other, and perhaps more significant, factors suggest themselves. Asimov had been asked by Doubleday to write a longer novel in Foundation's Edge, and it had come in at 140,000 words. It was a more discursive book than The Robots of Dawn, and it became a bestseller. Asimov wrote in his memoir that he assumed Doubleday wanted a robot novel of equal length, but he may have been influenced by the success of Foundation's Edge. The Robots of Dawn clearly had an excellent chance of equaling Foundation's Edge's success and almost did. In addition, one of the characteristics of bestselling science-fiction novels is length: there have been only a handful of them, and all have had a substantial heft to them. The possible consequence: Foundation's Edge was 366 pages, The Robots of Dawn was 419.
Perhaps the most important reason of all was that Asimov did not have an editor who could tell him, as John Campbell and Horace Gold and Walter Bradbury would have had no reluctance to tell him: "You're getting too wordy, Isaac [Campbell, at least, would have called him 'Asimov']. Tighten it up!" And, Asimov, always receptive to good editing (and convinced, as he says in his autobiography, that an editor has his role in the process and his prerogatives, just as the writer has his) would have tightened it up. And, as always when standards are raised for the good writer and the easy way is eliminated, the novel would have been better. It is not that Asimov did not want to write the best novel it was possible for him to write for the sake of his pride in his work, of which he had much, he wanted to write well. But a writer, particularly a writer like Asimov who said (though we must not take this as total truth) that he did not know anything about writing, needs a good editor. Whoever were Asimov's editors at Doubleday, even Bradbury if he were still there, would have had difficulty editing the Asimov of 1983. The Robots of Dawn was going to be a bestseller no matter how Asimov wrote it, as long as it was not a complete disgrace (and even then, some cynics would say). Asimov invested considerable time, effort, and thought in writing it it was not a disgrace but there was no incentive for him to keep it "direct and spare" or for an editor to tell him to do so. Like many of us over sixty (and particularly Asimov, who had had a heart attack and would soon have a triple-bypass operation), Asimov had recognized in recent years that his writing time was limited. Early in a writer's career he feels immortal, and he has time to write everything. Now Asimov realized that writing one book (or spending an excessive length of time on one) meant that he would not be able to write another; his editors knew this as well and would not, or could not, call to his attention anything more than gross errors. One does not edit bestselling authors or institutions, and Asimov was both.
In spite of such cavilings, The Robots of Dawn is an engrossing and well-written novel. Asimov could have been proud of it, and was. It is one of his better novels, if not one of his best, and if it does not add anything to the Robot novels, which still, to me, represent his highest accomplishments in the science-fiction novel, it does not diminish them either. It gave his loyal readers an opportunity to return to a familiar universe, and it did not exploit their affection, as sequels have often done. It gave good measure of fictional pleasure.
The most remarkable fact for me was that Asimov could do it, and even my recognition of the ways in which it could have been better cannot reduce my appreciation of what it achieved.
By the time The Robots of Dawn was published, Asimov had already resigned himself "totally to the writing of novels." He didn't record in his memoir the importunings of Doubleday. Perhaps, as in the case of The Robots of Dawn, Doubleday presented him with another contract before the novel was published; perhaps he notified Doubleday, as he wrote in his memoir, "my pleasure with The Robots of Dawn led me to write a fourth robot novel. In the fourth book, Elijah Baley would be dead, but I had already decided that the robot, Daneel Olivaw, was the real hero of the series, and he would continue to function."
Robots and Empire was not published until 1985. It was delayed by a deteriorating heart condition and a triple bypass operation (in which Asimov insisted that he didn't care what happened to his body, but he wanted plenty of oxygen during
the time he was on the heart-lung machine so that his brain would not be affected). Robots and Empire was the novel that Asimov remembered raising doubts about the del Reys purchasing the paperback rights when he told them he wanted to tie his Robot novels and Foundation stories together. Actually, the process seemed well underway in the first two 1980s novels.
In Robots and Empire Asimov wanted to achieve three links between his two great concepts:
1) to explain why the galactic empire was created by immigrants from Earth and not from the fifty Spacer worlds;
2) to explain the absence of robots in the Foundation stories;
3) to explain the radioactivity of Earth depicted in Pebble in the Sky.
In the process he wanted to lay the groundwork for how Earth came to be forgotten as the birthplace of humanity and how psychohistory came to be developed (an explanation already begun in The Robots of Dawn) as well as to make more plausible how humanity survived the many crises ahead that might have destroyed it, or space travel, before the galactic empire could be achieved.