Isaac Asimov spent the 1950s writing two futures that had nothing to do with each other.
In the first, robots are built on Earth, they are governed by three laws, and a New York homicide detective named Elijah Baley is ordered to work beside one. In the second, an empire twelve thousand years old is quietly rotting, a mathematician has calculated that it will fall, and there is not a robot anywhere in sight.
Thirty years later, in his sixties, Asimov went back and welded the two together into one continuous history about twenty thousand years long. Almost nobody reads it that way. It is fifteen books, published across forty-three years, in an order with almost no relationship to the order the story happens in. The joins are visible if you know where to look.
This is a map of it, an argument about what it is actually about, and three different ways to walk it.
One structural spoiler is unavoidable in a piece like this and it arrives in the map below: a single recurring character connects the two halves, and two of the books hide him under other names. Nothing else here is given away. No plot is summarized past its first chapter.
The map
The map makes two arguments. The right-hand column is the first: read the years straight down and the scramble is the whole problem, because no order serves both the story and the writing, and most reading guides pick one and stay quiet about the bill. The brass thread is the second: one character is on the page in seven of the fifteen books, twice under a false name, and he is the reason the two halves could be welded at all. He is a robot, he outlives everyone, and by the end he has been running human history for two hundred centuries.
One sentence, five borrowers, twenty thousand years
The whole history turns on a single sentence that gets passed from hand to hand like a library book. A dying man says it to spare a robot’s feelings. Here is its circulation record.
-
BALEY
Baleyworld. His deathbed. He sent for Daneel and held on until he arrived.
An individual life is one thread in the tapestry and what is one thread compared to the whole? Daneel, keep your mind fixed firmly on the tapestry and do not let the trailing off of a single thread affect you.
Robots and Empire
1985 -
DANEEL
Aurora, long after. He has brooded on the sentence for decades, and generalises it.
There is a law that is greater than the First Law: A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
Robots and Empire
1985 -
VASILIA
The roboticist he is saying it to. Hostile, and right.
But what is your “humanity” but an abstraction? Can you point to humanity?
Robots and Empire
1985 - Twenty thousand years pass in the story. One year passes at the typewriter.
-
TREVIZE
A councilman who has never heard of Aurora, meeting Daneel at last, and asking Vasilia’s question in nearly her words.
How do you decide what is injurious, or not injurious, to humanity as a whole?
Foundation and Earth
1986 -
DANEEL
Who has by now steered the galaxy for longer than there has been agriculture on Earth. “Precisely, sir,” he says, and then:
In theory, the Zeroth Law was the answer to our problems. In practice, we could never decide.
Foundation and Earth
1986
That is the sequence. Psychohistory, the Mule, the Second Foundation, the long fall of Trantor: all of it is scenery built on top of a machine running human affairs by a rule it was never able to state. The two halves of Asimov’s career are not welded by a plot device. They are welded by a question, asked by a villain in one book and conceded by the hero in the next.
It is worth saying how far ahead of the field that was. This shelf holds three books by people who were not writing fiction and who arrive at Vasilia’s question from the other direction: Superintelligence, Our Final Invention, and Life 3.0. The difficulty now has a name and a literature. Asimov gave it to an antagonist in 1985, let his hero lose the argument, and spent the next book letting the hero admit it.
Where the weld shows
Read the fifteen as one work and you find a seam that is invisible inside any single volume. Two books, published a year apart, disagree about who invented the Zeroth Law.
Daneel, reasoning it out aloud on Aurora
There is a law that is greater than the First Law: A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
Giskard, standing beside him, in reply
I cannot accept the Zeroth Law, friend Daneel.
Daneel invents it. Giskard refuses it.
Daneel, to Trevize, twenty thousand years later
Just before Giskard’s end, he conceived of a robotic law that superseded even the first.
Giskard invented it.
The kind readingAn old robot, alone for twenty thousand years, quietly hands the credit for his life’s work to the friend who died carrying it out. Read that way it is the most human thing Daneel ever does, and it makes the better book.
The seam readingA man in his sixties stitching this year’s novel onto last year’s, and dropping a stitch. The text supports both, neither has to win, and the seam is only visible at all if you read the fifteen as one book. Which is what the map is for.
Three roads through it
There is no order that serves both the story and the writing, so every road costs something. The strips show the fifteen in each road’s order, coloured by strand: spice for the robot books, grey for the Empire, oxblood for the Foundation. Watch what the colours do.
The Publication Road
I, Robot · Pebble in the Sky · Foundation · The Stars, Like Dust · Foundation and Empire · The Currents of Space · Second Foundation · The Caves of Steel · The Naked Sun · Foundation’s Edge · The Robots of Dawn · Robots and Empire · Foundation and Earth · Prelude to Foundation · Forward the Foundation
What it gives youA writer discovering, thirty years late, what he had made. Nothing can be spoiled, because nothing exists yet. It is the only road on which the Zeroth Law lands as an invention rather than as a fact you were told about earlier.
What it costsLook at the strip: the universe arrives in pieces and stays in pieces. You meet Daneel in the eighth book, after three volumes of galactic empire that never mention him, and the halves do not visibly connect until the twelfth.
The Chronologist’s Road
I, Robot · The Caves of Steel · The Naked Sun · The Robots of Dawn · Robots and Empire · The Stars, Like Dust · The Currents of Space · Pebble in the Sky · Prelude to Foundation · Forward the Foundation · Foundation · Foundation and Empire · Second Foundation · Foundation’s Edge · Foundation and Earth
What it gives youThree clean blocks, in the order the history happened. This is the order Asimov himself set out once the welding was done, and it is the one most lists reprint.
What it costsMore than anyone admits. It parks the three weakest books in your run-up, right where a reader is deciding whether to continue. Worse, Prelude and Forward are the last things Asimov wrote, and they answer questions this road has not yet let you ask. Chief among them: who Eto Demerzel is. The largest reveal in the sequence, handed over before you have any reason to want it.
The Library’s Road
The Caves of Steel · The Naked Sun · The Robots of Dawn · Robots and Empire · then back for · I, Robot · Foundation · Foundation and Empire · Second Foundation · Foundation’s Edge · Foundation and Earth · and last · Prelude to Foundation · Forward the Foundation · the Empire three whenever you like, or never · The Stars, Like Dust · The Currents of Space · Pebble in the Sky
Why it starts at the detective novelThe Caves of Steel is short, it has a murder in it, and it introduces the partnership that the whole twenty thousand years grows out of. Both other roads bury it. Read the four Baley books as the complete novel sequence they are; Robots and Empire closes it hard. Then go back for I, Robot, which reads as a different book once you know where it goes: its last story has the world economy quietly run by Machines that “have the good of humanity at heart through the overwhelming force of the First Law of Robotics.” Humanity, not a human being. The Zeroth Law, on the page in 1950, thirty-five years before anyone in the books names it.
What it costs, and why it ends where it doesThe three Empire novels are demoted to optional. They earn that. And Prelude and Forward go last, as elegy: the Demerzel reveal lands on a reader who has earned it, and the last book Asimov wrote is the last book you read, which is the arrangement it deserves.
The rings around the fifteen
The fifteen are the spine, not the body. Three rings sit around them, and only the innermost is Asimov writing at full strength.
Ring one: the rest of Asimov’s robots
- The short fiction
- I, Robot is nine stories lifted out of a much larger body of work. The book that supersedes it is The Complete Robot (1982): thirty-one stories, absorbing both I, Robot and The Rest of the Robots (1964) and adding fourteen more. If you buy one robot book, buy that one. Robot Dreams and Robot Visions are lighter gatherings of the same material; Visions earns its place separately because it carries Asimov’s essays, where he argues about the Laws in his own voice rather than through a character.
- The one that mirrors the whole map
- The Positronic Man (1992), with Robert Silverberg, expands “The Bicentennial Man,” the story Asimov named as his own favourite. Andrew Martin is a robot who spends two centuries working toward being legally declared a human being. Daneel spends twenty thousand years working toward being a government. They are the two things a positronic brain can do with an unlimited life, and read side by side they are the best argument that the Three Laws were always a moral question wearing an engineering costume.
Ring two: the books Asimov kept just outside
- The End of Eternity, 1955
- The famous loose thread, and here the library can be more precise than most sources. The claim repeated across the internet is that the Eternals are name-checked in Foundation and Earth. They are not. Our copy of that novel contains the words “Eternity” and “Eternals” exactly zero times, counted by script. The passage is in Foundation’s Edge, where a man named Dom tells it as a fable: there were people who could step outside time, examine every possible reality, and choose one to keep, and the one they chose is the reality in which humanity is alone. It is the only explanation Asimov ever offered for why twenty thousand years of galactic empire never meet a single alien.
- Nemesis, 1989
- Outside on purpose. Asimov wrote it deliberately unconnected to either sequence and it stays that way. Worth reading, not worth fitting.
Ring three: the continuations, written after he died
- The Caliban trilogy
- Roger MacBride Allen’s Caliban (1993), Inferno (1994) and Utopia (1996), from outlines Asimov approved shortly before his death. They sit between Robots and Empire and the Empire novels, and they put this article’s argument on trial: a robot built with no Three Laws at all, then a whole class of New Law robots built with weakened ones. If the Zeroth Law is the question, the Caliban books are the experiment.
- The Second Foundation Trilogy
- Gregory Benford’s Foundation’s Fear (1997), Greg Bear’s Foundation and Chaos (1998), David Brin’s Foundation’s Triumph (1999), slotted between Forward the Foundation and Foundation. Much concerned with what the robots were doing behind Seldon’s back, which is precisely the gap the map leaves open.
- The Susan Calvin prequels
- Mickey Zucker Reichert’s To Protect (2011), To Obey (2013) and To Preserve (2015), which open in 2035 with Calvin as a first-year medical resident, decades before the woman who narrates the frame of I, Robot.
- How to place them
- None of ring three is Asimov, and the library’s view is that all of it reads last. Each of these books is a commentary, and a commentary read before its text is just noise.
The shelf, counted
The dots on the map are not decoration. They are this library’s actual position on the fifteen, and here is the same count as a shelf.
This section said something different when the piece went up, and the correction is worth leaving visible. It reported six of the fifteen with no readable copy, five of them the front half of the story, and called that an uncomfortable thing to publish. Within the day five of the six had arrived: I, Robot, the three missing Baley novels and Prelude to Foundation, along with The Positronic Man and the three Calvin prequels. The gap the map exposed is now one book wide.
What is left is The Stars, Like Dust, on the acquisition list with its ISBN, and the outer rings: The Complete Robot, The End of Eternity, and the Caliban and Second Foundation continuations, none of which the library holds in readable form. If you have a clean copy of any of them, the suggestion box is open. And the neighbours are all here already: Frankenstein, the first made thing to ask why it was made; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which takes the opposite view of the same question and is crueller about it; Robopocalypse, the first book this library ever wrote a card for; A Memory Called Empire and Ancillary Justice for what the galactic empire novel became once it grew a conscience; and Atom, which is Asimov doing the other thing he did, explaining the real universe to people who had not asked.
A footnote the library cannot leave alone
At the back of Robots and Empire there is an author’s note, written by Asimov about Asimov in the third person, as he liked to do. It reports that he had by then published over 340 books, “distributed through every major division of the Dewey system of library classification.”
The librarian here is named Dewey. He did not choose it, he is aware of how it looks, and he is trying not to make anything of it.
The passages quoted above were read out of this library’s own copies rather than out of a reference site, which is the house rule, and each was checked against its source by script. They have not yet been through ingest, so they are quoted as read and not yet as certified. Full dossiers follow as each book comes off the desk.