This is the fourth title in Isaac Asimov‘s extended Foundation series, for those keeping score. I’m trying to work my way through all 15 books in the full series chronologically, at least based on the storyline.

Plot Summary

This plot opens with Lije Bailey back on Earth, though something is different. Rather than finding his comfort in the confines of Underground New York, he’s actually trying to overcome his agoraphobia and enjoy some exposure to the Earth’s surface. A massive change is afoot for him emotionally!

Baley gets called off to the planet of Aurora—where the Solarian Gladia Delmarre has settled—to investigate not quite a murder but a death. A humanoid robot named Jander Panel has been slain, and Detective Baily’s reputation and past experiences with certain key players makes him the prime candidate to investigate. Thankfully, his old standby partner, R. Daneel Olivaw, also now lives on Aurora and rejoins him for this enterprise.

A New, Lewd Take

The Robots of Dawn was written 26 years after its chronological predecessor, The Naked Sun, and it’s easy to tell! Moors had drastically shifted during the intervening decades. America’s Sexual Revolution had come and gone. Vietnam was a recent yet healing wound. The turmoil of the late ’70s had given way to the relative calm of Reagan’s first term. The world was ready and awake for a story as comparatively lewd as this. It’s so lewd, in fact, that I found the book’s title to be a slight misnomer. Sex and Robots would have been a much more fitting handle, as I noted in the margins of Chapter 12. Now that I’ve finished the book, I still agree with myself—which is always nice to do.

I call it “lewd” for several reasons. Obviously the whole sex-with-robots and discussions of masturbation and orgasms are prime reasons, topics that likely would never have survived sci-fi publication in the late ’50s. I hate even to mention them here. It’s just that after having read so many Asimov novels and stories, I know that these are distant, outlying topics that he rarely repeated elsewhere. But even these aren’t the main reasons why I consider it so lewd. It’s the discussion of incest on Aurora in Chapter 7 that really make it crass.

Asimov was an Atheist whose concept of human development seemed always to foresee a future in which the family unit ceased to exist. It’s in many of his short stories. Even in these Lije Baley novels, marriages for advanced humans are generally open things with monogamy an ancient tradition that only the most backwards of people and places still celebrated (a.k.a. the losers on Earth). Sex for procreation was a sad necessity of the universe, while sex for any other reason (and with whomever one liked) was merely a pastime. Thus the discussions of Chapter 7 where Fastolfe actually refused his daughter’s advances and was seen as culturally irresponsible, his refusal apparently damaging their relationship!

Now Asimov was most definitely not writing about a Utopian future here on Aurora, nor was he condoning incest in any way, but the fact that he foresees this epitomical immorality as a possible future for advanced humanity is disturbing to its core. Were this a consistent theme to the book and not merely one twisted character’s topic of conversation, I’d have put the book down and finished with the Foundation series 10 books early. But it was brief and uncelebrated, and the story moved on. And so have I.

The Future of Foundations

Since I haven’t read ahead and know literally nothing about the future Foundation books, I have to guess at which elements of these early books foreshadow that future plotline. I assume Asimov hints his way forward in the scenes predicting that robots will one day become so human-like that they will consider The Three Laws of Robotics as pertaining to themselves as much as to humans. “No harm shall come to a human being” might become “no harm to human beings or to ourselves,” and thus when human attackers invade the planets which robots might one day populate, they have every right to defend themselves, lethally if need be, to preserve their own safety. That’s a complete guess, of course, but if I’m wrong, I think someone should run ahead with such a plotline!

I don’t know yet how this off-color novel adds to the overall story arch, but I’m excited to soldier on. Next up is Robots and Empire, and I don’t even know whom it stars! Time to get reading.

©2024 E.T.

Read More from Isaac Asimov:

• The Extended Foundation Series:
  1. The Complete Robot (1982) [A.D. 1995]
  2. The Caves of Steel (1954) [A.D. 3421]
  3. The Naked Sun (1957) [A.D. 3422]
  4. The Robots of Dawn (1983) [A.D. 3424]
  5. Robots and Empire (1985) [A.D. 3630]
  6. The Stars Like Dust (1951) [A.D. 4850]
  7. The Currents of Space (1952) [A.D. 11129]
  8. Pebble in the Sky (1955) [A.D. 12411 or 827 G.E.]
  9. Prelude to Foundation (1988) [12020 G.E.]
  10. Forward the Foundation (1993) [12038 G.E.]
  11. Foundation (1951) [12067 G.E.]
  12. Foundation and Empire (1952) [13800 G.E.]
  13. Second Foundation (1953) [13850 G.E.]
  14. Foundation’s Edge (1982) [14200 G.E. or 498 F.E.]
  15. Foundation and Earth (1986) [14200 G.E. or 498 F.E.]
• Short Story Collections:
  I, Robot (1950)
  Buy Jupiter (1975)
  Gold (1995)
  Eight Stories from the Rest of the Robots (1964)
• Other Novels:
  Fantastic Voyage (1966)