Fifteen Books and One Robot: A Map of Asimov’s Universe

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, three different ways to walk it, and, now that all fifteen are in the building and machine-readable, a count of some things that are not in them.

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 summarised 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.

The scramble, drawn

The right-hand column of the map is easy to skim past. Here it is as a picture. On the left the fifteen stand in the order Asimov published them; on the right, in the order they happen. Every line is one book.

LEFT: THE ORDER HE WROTE THEM. RIGHT: THE ORDER IT HAPPENS. The colour is the strand: spice for the robot books, grey for the Empire, oxblood for the Foundation.

The left column has no pattern in it. The right column has three solid blocks. Everything between the two, all that crossing, is work Asimov did after 1982, and it is worth being precise about what the work was: he did not go back and revise the 1950s books. He left them exactly as they were and wrote six new ones that make the old ones mean something else. The welding is done entirely from one end.

The silence, and what came back out of it

There is a second thing the years do that a single column cannot show. Asimov published nine of these fifteen between 1950 and 1957. Then he stopped. The next one is 1982.

THE FIFTEEN IN PUBLICATION ORDER. Bar length is words of body text in this library’s own copy, counted by `Scripts/word_count.py`, which is the one definition of a word this shelf uses.

The nine books he wrote before the silence come to 617,049 words. The six he wrote after it come to 812,698. Six books outweigh nine, and the average novel goes from 68,561 words to 135,449, which is almost exactly double. That is not a small stylistic drift. The man who came back in 1982 wrote at twice the length of the man who left in 1957, and the six long books are the ones doing the welding. The sequence is not fifteen books of equal weight; it is nine short ones and six long ones written to explain them.

One sentence, six 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.

Watch the word abstraction. Vasilia uses it to attack the Zeroth Law in 1985. Giskard uses it in the same room, minutes later, to refuse the law outright. And in 1986, twenty thousand years further on, Daneel uses it himself to explain why the law never worked. 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 its own inventor concedes he could never apply.

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, had a second robot refuse the whole idea on the spot, and spent the next book letting the hero admit both of them were right.

The law above the laws

The Three Laws are the most quoted thing Asimov ever wrote. What the fifteen are actually about is the fourth one, which is numbered zero because it was added on top of a finished list.

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.

What the books do not say

Having all fifteen in the building as machine-readable text makes a kind of reading possible that a paper shelf does not. You can ask what is absent. Two of the answers turned out to be better than anything the presence of things could show.

TWO SERIES, ONE AXIS OF THE FIFTEEN IN STORY ORDER. Raw counts in the body text of this library’s copies; the late books are about twice the length of the early ones, so the bars flatter them. A zero is a zero at any length.

The upper series is the brass thread from the map, counted. Daneel is named 472 times in The Caves of Steel and 749 times in Robots and Empire. Across the three Empire novels he is named none. In the two Seldon novels he is on the page constantly and almost never under his own name: Prelude to Foundation calls him Chetter Hummin 353 times and Eto Demerzel 135 times, against 13 uses of “Daneel”. Then four books in which the word does not occur, and then, in the last book of the sequence, 49.

The lower series is the one worth stopping on. Across the four books at the centre of the story, the planet Earth is not named once. Forward the Foundation, Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation come to 332,066 words between them and do not contain the word. A case-blind search of all four turns up exactly five hits and every one of them is something else: three are lower-case soil (“clods of earth”, “a shaven area of earth”, “came slowly to earth”), one is the idiom “down-to-earth”, and one is the title Foundation and Earth printed on a list of other books by the author at the back.

Then Foundation’s Edge names it 189 times and Foundation and Earth names it 434. The shape of the whole sequence is in those two rows: humanity leaves Earth, forgets it so completely that four consecutive novels never mention it, and then spends two books looking for it. Asimov did not plan that. The forgetting happened because in 1951 he was writing about Trantor and Earth was not interesting to him. The looking happened thirty-one years later, when he needed the two halves to meet. The gap between them is the weld, and it is measurable.

The bridge that is not there

The three Empire novels are usually described as the bridge between the robots and the Foundation. They are shelved that way, they are read that way, and the map above puts them in the middle for that reason. Here is every appearance of the word “robot” in all three.

That is the complete list. 198,816 words of alleged bridge contain three occurrences of the word, one of which is a bellhop and two of which are the same footnote about a civilisation that is already extinct. There is no bridge. Asimov wrote three unrelated galactic adventures in the early 1950s, and thirty years later he decided they had been in the same universe all along and wrote Robots and Empire to make it true from the other side. The Empire novels are not the bridge; they are the far bank, and it is a fair reading of this page that they are optional because they were never load-bearing.

This is also, incidentally, the best evidence for what kind of thing the fifteen are. Nobody planned them. The unity is real, but it was manufactured late, by one man in his sixties, working backwards, and the places where the manufacture shows are the most interesting parts of the whole sequence.

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 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.

The shelf, counted

The dots on the map are not decoration. They are this library’s actual position on the fifteen, and as of this month there is nothing left to report but the whole of it.

This section has been wrong twice, and both corrections are worth leaving visible. When the piece went up on 28 August 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 and the section was rewritten to say the gap was one book wide. That was The Stars, Like Dust, and it is now here too.

It arrived under a different name. Our copy is The Rebellious Stars, which is how Ace printed the novel in 1954 as one half of Ace Double D-84, bound head to tail with another book; the title page prints The Stars, Like Dust underneath as the original title, and the shelf files a book under the name it prints. It is a hand conversion of a scan of a paperback, the only one of the fifteen that is not descended from a publisher’s file, and it carries two pages of the Double’s own jacket copy that were nearly thrown away as a repackager’s padding before the line “Turn this book over for second complete novel” proved they were printed pages of the object. Its dossier is worth reading for that alone.

What is left is the outer rings: The Complete Robot, The End of Eternity, and the Caliban and Second Foundation continuations, none of which this library holds in readable form. Nemesis went onto the desk this morning. If you have a clean copy of any of the others, 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.

Every passage quoted above was read out of this library’s own copies rather than out of a reference site, which is the house rule, and checked against its source by script. So was every number: the word counts come from Scripts/word_count.py, which is the single definition of a word this shelf uses, and the name counts were taken from the reading text with the library’s own notes and headings stripped out first, so that nothing Dewey wrote is counted as something Asimov wrote. All fifteen have now been through ingest and carry full dossiers; the links above go to them.