i should have waited to comment on the second robot novel, so i'm going to hold off on this one, but my initial take is that the 25 year time lag is a sort of a clean break, conceptually. they're the same characters, and i'm sure the story will develop similarly, but it's also a very different type of novel, that is reflective of changes in the genre over the period. in the 40s and 50s, science fiction was just a mechanism for dystopian literature, so it was not fundamentally different than other types of literature, really, it just had a different setting. and, that would have been true through the 60s (you can really see that in the initial run of star trek, which frequently played on everything in the traditional canon of literature, from shakespeare to classical mythology), up until star wars, which sort of broke everything and left the genre in a juvenile state of focusing on special effects, like any other adventure film. this third robot novel was written and published in the early 80s, in the midst of the major shift in the genre that was happening.

asimov is adjusting by focusing more on how he sees the technology of the future, making it more of an exercise in futurism, which is what the standard was at the time in the literature, if not in the films. you see that kind of thing come out later in, like, cronenberg films, but not in the early 80s. and, i should point out that while daneel predated spock by a good distance, this text was written right in the middle of the star wars and star trek boom of the early 80s - and you can tell.

i don't remember the text and don't think i actually read it as a child, so i don't know the plot. but, i'm not expecting the same kind of allegorical treatment - i'm expecting a sort of empty exercise in futurism that will leave me sort of bored, as an adult.

i said that last time, though, and realized in the end that it was clearly about marxist alienation, even if it was sort of blurry. so, we'll see what happens.