Robots and Empire is a science fiction novel by the American author Isaac Asimov, published by Doubleday Books in 1985. It is part of Asimov's Robot series, which consists of many short stories (collected in I, Robot, The Rest of the Robots, The Complete Robot, Robot Dreams, Robot Visions, and Gold) and five novels (including The Positronic Man, The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, and The Robots of Dawn).
Robots and Empire is part of Asimov's consolidation of his three major series of science fiction stories and novels into a single future history: his Robot series, his Galactic Empire series and his Foundation series. (Asimov also carried out this unification in Foundation's Edge and its sequel.)
In the novel, Asimov depicts the transition from his earlier Milky Way Galaxy, inhabited by both human beings and positronic robots, to his Galactic Empire. The galaxy of his earlier trilogy of Robot novels is dominated by the blended human/robotic societies of the fifty "Spacer" planets, dispersed through the near-Earth part of the Galaxy. While the Earth is much more populous than all of the Spacer planets combined, its people are looked down upon and treated almost as sub-human by the Spacers. For a long time, the Spacers have forbidden immigration of people from the Earth. But Asimov's later Galactic Empire is populated by many quadrillions of human beings on hundreds of thousands of habitable planets and by very few robots (such as R. Daneel Olivaw). Even the technology to maintain and upgrade robots exists on only a few out-of-the-way planets. Therefore, this novel attempts to describe how his earlier Robot series ultimately connects to his Galactic Empire series.
Plot summary
The Earthman Elijah Baley (the detective hero of the previous Robot books) has died nearly two centuries earlier. During these two centuries, Earth-people have overcome their agoraphobia and resumed space colonization, using faster-than-light drive to reach distant planets beyond the earlier "Spacer" worlds. Their inhabitants, calling themselves "Settlers" rather than "Spacers", revere Earth as their mother-world.
Baley's memory remains in the mind of his former lover, Gladia Delmarre, a long-lived "Spacer" who uncharacteristically relocated from the spacer world of Solaria to Aurora. Gladia's homeworld and the 50th-established of the Spacer planets, Solaria, has become empty of all human inhabitants, although millions of robot servants remain. A seventh-generation descendant of Baley's, Daneel Giskard ('D.G.') Baley, gains Gladia's help in visiting Solaria, to investigate the destruction of several "Settler" spaceships that made landings there and to capture the presumably unsupervised robots. Gladia is accompanied by the positronic robots R Daneel Olivaw and R Giskard Reventlov, both the former property of their creator, Dr Han Fastolfe, who bequeathed them to Gladia in his will. R Giskard has secret telepathic powers of which only R Daneel knows.
At the same time, Daneel and Giskard are engaged in a struggle of wits with Fastolfe's rivals: The roboticists Kelden Amadiro and Vasilia Aliena, Fastolfe's estranged daughter. Frustrated by his series of failures, Amadiro accepts an ambitious and unscrupulous apprentice, Levular Mandamus, who plans to destroy the population of the Earth by a newly developed weapon, the "nuclear intensifier", with which to accelerate the natural radioactive decay in the upper crust of the Earth, thereby making the surface of the Earth radioactive. R Daneel and R Giskard discover the roboticists' plan and attempt to stop Amadiro; but are hampered by the First Law of Robotics,
which prevents them from a direct attack on Amadiro. Daneel and Giskard, meanwhile, have inferred an additional Zeroth Law of Robotics:
It might enable them to overcome Amadiro, if they can use their telepathic perception of humanity to quell the inhibitions of the first law. When Vasilia accuses Giskard of telepathy (earlier created by herself), Giskard is compelled to manipulate her mind to make her forget about his telepathic powers. The two robots locate Amadiro and Mandamus on Earth, at the site of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania. After Amadiro admits their plans, Giskard alters Amadiro's brain (using the newly created Zeroth Law); but in so doing, threatens his own.