Robots, Empires and Foundations

Asimov.  You really can't talk about Science Fiction without mentioning Isaac Asimov's name.  The Three Laws of Robotics?  Faster Than Light space travel?  Hyperwave?  Psychohistory?

The man wrote over 400 books!  Many of them firmly in the Sci-Fi realm.  I had previously read several of the Robot Series books.  I Robot, Caves of Steel, and the Naked Sun.  I'm not really sure why I stopped there.  Maybe I just wasn't in my 'binge' mode.  There are actually two more Robot Novels, two more Robot short story collections (one of which includes the short story version of 'Bicentennial Man'... one of my favorite movies), and that doesn't even include the rest of his magnum opus universe which includes the Empire books and the Foundation books.

Well... here and now I plan to fix that.  Er... well maybe 'now' is to strong of a word.  But over the next year or so (between new Stephen King Books) I plan on fixing that.
The first time I read the Robot books was back around High School.  Maybe early college.  I was disappointed to find out that I Robot was in fact a collection of short stories.  Sure, there is a wrap around story about an reporter interviewing a great roboticist, but all of the roboticist's stories are the short stories.

After that I expected that all of the books were like that, but in fact Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun are both murder mysteries.  Wait, what?  That's right.  They center around a detective named Elijah Baley in some future Earth and his partner R Daneel Olivaw.  The R stands for Robot.  They are very interesting books about a future from a 1950s standpoint.

A few months back I decided to re-read the Robot books and finish off the experience by reading the remaining Robot books The Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire.  I just yesterday finished off The Robots of Dawn and it fits nicely with the previous books.  But the title of the next book, Robots and Empire made me sit back and think.

I had of course heard of Asimov's Empire series as well as his Foundation series.  So instead of just diving in and reading Robots and Empire I dug deeper to find out if these series were somehow connected.  It turns out they are.

Here are Robot Books:

• I, Robot
• The Caves of Steel
• The Naked Sun
• The Robots of Dawn
• Robots and Empire

Here are the Empire Books:

• The Stars, Like Dust
• The Currents of Space
• Pebble in the Sky

And here are the Foundation Books:

• Foundation
• Foundation and Empire
• Second Foundation
• Foundation's Edge
• Foundation and Earth
• Prelude to Foundation
• Forward the Foundation

Now these are in order of publication date... but it's not as though he wrote them in that particular order.  Here's the entire book set in the order of publication:

• Pebble in the Sky (1950)
• I, Robot (1950)
• The Stars, Like Dust (1951)
• Foundation (1951)
• The Currents of Space (1952)
• Foundation and Empire (1952)
• The Caves of Steel (1953)
• Second Foundation (1953)
• The Naked Sun (1955)
• Foundation's Edge (1982)
• The Robots of Dawn (1983)
• Robots and Empire (1985)
• Foundation and Earth (1986)
• Prelude to Foundation (1988) 
• Forward the Foundation (1993)

Now I'm all about reading books in the proper order, but that would just be damned confusing.  Hell, some of the Robot's books are hard enough to read as The Robots of Dawn was written over 30 years after The Naked Sun.  So... after a bit of research (with a major attempt made to not read what the individual stories or series are about), I finally got the proper order.   Evidently this order was suggested by Asimov himself... it also included several stories from other authors, but I am deciding to ignore those.  Maybe if I aabsolutely fall in love with these books I'll tackle them, but as for now this sets me up nicely for the next year or so.

• I, Robot (1950)
• The Caves of Steel (1953)
• The Naked Sun (1955)
• The Robots of Dawn (1983)
• Robots and Empire (1985)

• The Stars, Like Dust (1951)
• The Currents of Space (1952)
• Pebble in the Sky (1950)

• Prelude to Foundation (1988) 
• Forward the Foundation (1993)
• Foundation (1951)
• Foundation and Empire (1952)
• Second Foundation (1953),
• Foundation's Edge (1982).
• Foundation and Earth (1986)

So with the list now set, all I have to do is get the books.  As I mentioned earlier I've just finished with The Robots of Dawn so last night I went on to Amazon to get Robots and Empire for my trusty Kindle.  

It's not available. 

WTF!?!!?

That's right.  For the first time since I got my Kindle several years ago, I have found a book that I want to read that isn't available.   It couldn't happen at a worse time as my hometown doesn't have any major bookstores any longer.  So I had to flip through Amazon's pages and find a paperback edition to read.  I bought it for like $5 and $4 shipping and didn't bother to look at the dates it would arrive.... 

I won't get the damned book for at least a week.  Worse than that late deliver date is the date range they use.  I MIGHT get it as early as the 9th... I might not get the damned thing until October 27th!!!

Grr.

So in the meantime I am re-reading Stephen King's The Stand.  I know... it's not exactly a short book, but I don't plan to finish it.  It's one of those books that I've read many MANY times, and I can happily read the first few chapters and then drop it to continue on in the Asimov universe. 

Happy Reading everybody!