it's probably best interpreted as asimov reclaiming his own franchise.
but, it's obviously written to close down the robot universe and transition into the empire universe - intentionally. conscientiously. - so i'm actually going to hold off a little on the write-up. i mean, it's sort of the last robot novel, and sort of the first empire novel. that means i need to frame it properly, which means i should probably do the review last.
that said, i want to reframe my project goals on this. how many books can i read on fridays? i decided on two, but that's too vague - i can read two 200 page novels (as the first two robot novels were), but i can probably only get through one 500 page novel, which is closer to the length of the last two robot novels. i'm not altering the idea of one book per week, in the journal phase. but, i'm setting myself up with 500 pages max per week on the catchup run, until i'm caught up.
that means the robots of dawn can be dated for the 3rd, robots and empire can be dated for the tenth and i still have at least two empire novels to get through this weekend, although i'll probably do all three.
when i'm done with that, i'm going to focus on doing one journal write-up a day for the next week.
so, that's what i'm doing this week - and i should hopefully be caught up in a few days.
what is this text about, though? it's actually the only one of the four with legitimate depth. if the first one was a heavy-handed allegory about a conflict between utopian socialists and an elitist vanguard that ended in a dialectic of cooperation, and the second two were looser allegories about alienation and hedonism, the fourth finally pulls it together and takes it to the next step: historical materialism enters in the technologically determinist mechanism (and marx was a teleological technological determinist, despite his empty pleas to the contrary) of a mind-controlling robot that is opening the way for proletariat settlement across the galaxy. it turns out that the spacers are actually under the control of the technology. asimov develops this in multiple directions that i'm going to wait to discuss much more because i think he makes some confusing allusions (carthago delenda est is difficult to put into broader context), but i'm going to answer the question in a way that i think is not what many people want to assume - i think he's converting the vanguard spacer worlds into a historical coalition of greek city states, and contrasting it against the proletariat settlers, who he's casting as early romans, before they become too imperialist. so, this isn't just a story about technological determinism guiding robots into playing the role of historical materialism in guiding the vanguard out of the way to make space for the proletariat; it's also a discourse on why the greeks failed and the romans succeeded. there's layers here, and a lot to deconstruct, but asimov can be inconsistent at the best of times, and i want to work out the contradictions and inconsistencies before i do this in too much detail.
it doesn't really make sense to think of the spacers as romans and the earthlings as carthaginians, for example. the carthaginians were the older power, to begin with - the more civilized state. it was the romans that were the upstart. nor did the romans and carthaginians have common origins - they were distinctly different races of people, in just about every way. but, the romans and greeks had common origins in the proto-germanic powers to their north. the spacer confederation seems more like something like the delian league, trying to react to the rise of the barbarian romans.
i'll note, though, that asimov is pretty vicious on the settlers, who he is constantly disparaging...
anyways, that's just a stop-gap update, for now. i need to eat, and do a little cleaning, and i'll get to the next batch after that.
