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Sequels are chancy. They share some of the problems that serial work has - continuity errors, shifts in artistic focus, Better Ideas, and the like. One of the worst things a sequel can do is to destroy the, or a, powerful effect from a predecessor. For example, I think Douglas Adams' decision, in Life, the Universe, and Everything, to explain "Oh, no, not again!" was one of his worst choices. To reduce the open-ended hilarity of the bowl of petunias to the silliness of Agrajag was just dumb.
Sequels which appear after a long interval are even riskier. The ending of 2001 was haunting and evocative; I think it was a major error on Clarke's part to write 2010. The sheer banality of "what happened next" is a severe disappointment. I wish Alexei Panshin had written The Universal Pantograph soon after Masque World; I would not want him to write it now.
Which brings me to The Robots of Dawn. It's a good enough novel, I suppose, but I have a few problems with it. First is the usual sort of continuity problem: the Lije Baley of this book is talkative to the point of banality - he sounds more like a professor guiding students through an intricate proof (and I speak from experience here) than like the soft-boiled detective of the first two books. Granted, Asimov tries to justify this by mentioning the fact that Daneel, being a robot, will patiently listen to him until his argument is complete, but Baley speaks in the same fashion to Gladia, to Fastolfe, to the Chairman (and the Chairman calls him on it). This is not (quite) the same character. It's not too great a flaw, but it is a flaw.
Somewhat worse, I think, is the change in the role that the novel plays in the overall structure of Asimov's universe. Somewhere, Asimov tells why he didn't write The Robots of Dawn right after The Naked Sun; he had begun writing it when Sputnik was launched, and he felt himself compelled to shift his emphasis to non-fiction, to educating the general public in science. I don't complain about this; his essays on science and mathematics delighted me when I was young. But something was lost. In the course of writing The Naked Sun - or perhaps just after - Asimov realized that he was, in fact, writing a trilogy. He had written of Earth, almost purely human with a tiny leavening of robots, in The Caves of Steel; he had followed up with Solaria, with its population of almost desocialized humans floating in a robotic sea, in The Naked Sun; and now it was time to write of Aurora, a society in balance between human and robot. It is possible that he would not have been able to write that book, or to make it an artistic success; it would have been close to a utopia, and successful utopias, even in literature, are rare. In any event, he did not write that book, and the artistic unity that the trilogy could have been never came to be.
Instead, Asimov presents Aurora as being as ultimately doomed as Solaria; long-lived humans, cushioned from hardship by the ubiquitous robots, have lost any real creativity. (It occurs to me that this is a variation on Jack Williamson's "Humanoids" theme - a more subtle destruction of humanity by those who wish it nothing but good.) The root, I suppose, is his - I think, ill-chosen - decision to integrate the robot novels with the Foundation series. Since robots are missing from the Foundation trilogy, something must be done to remove them, or at least render them invisible, and the dream of C/Fe has to die. (For that matter, the Baley novels aren't quite consistent with the Susan Calvin stories, either; the world depicted in "The Evitable Conflict" could not easily have turned into the world of The Caves of Steel, I think.) I had not realized until this reading that Giskard's story heralds the Gaia of the later Foundation novels, but I think that Gaia itself was a mistake. The Mule as a freakish mutant is a far more interesting character, I believe, than the Mule as a refugee from a planet of telepathic robots. (Or am I misremembering? I read Foundation's Edge but did not keep it, and I did little more than browse in one or two of the later Foundation novels, so my memory may be faulty; but that is the impression I have.)
Do I wish The Robots of Dawn had never been written, as I do 2010? No. But I think the 1957 version would have been more artistically satisfying, in some respects.
Sequels which appear after a long interval are even riskier. The ending of 2001 was haunting and evocative; I think it was a major error on Clarke's part to write 2010. The sheer banality of "what happened next" is a severe disappointment. I wish Alexei Panshin had written The Universal Pantograph soon after Masque World; I would not want him to write it now.
Which brings me to The Robots of Dawn. It's a good enough novel, I suppose, but I have a few problems with it. First is the usual sort of continuity problem: the Lije Baley of this book is talkative to the point of banality - he sounds more like a professor guiding students through an intricate proof (and I speak from experience here) than like the soft-boiled detective of the first two books. Granted, Asimov tries to justify this by mentioning the fact that Daneel, being a robot, will patiently listen to him until his argument is complete, but Baley speaks in the same fashion to Gladia, to Fastolfe, to the Chairman (and the Chairman calls him on it). This is not (quite) the same character. It's not too great a flaw, but it is a flaw.
Somewhat worse, I think, is the change in the role that the novel plays in the overall structure of Asimov's universe. Somewhere, Asimov tells why he didn't write The Robots of Dawn right after The Naked Sun; he had begun writing it when Sputnik was launched, and he felt himself compelled to shift his emphasis to non-fiction, to educating the general public in science. I don't complain about this; his essays on science and mathematics delighted me when I was young. But something was lost. In the course of writing The Naked Sun - or perhaps just after - Asimov realized that he was, in fact, writing a trilogy. He had written of Earth, almost purely human with a tiny leavening of robots, in The Caves of Steel; he had followed up with Solaria, with its population of almost desocialized humans floating in a robotic sea, in The Naked Sun; and now it was time to write of Aurora, a society in balance between human and robot. It is possible that he would not have been able to write that book, or to make it an artistic success; it would have been close to a utopia, and successful utopias, even in literature, are rare. In any event, he did not write that book, and the artistic unity that the trilogy could have been never came to be.
Instead, Asimov presents Aurora as being as ultimately doomed as Solaria; long-lived humans, cushioned from hardship by the ubiquitous robots, have lost any real creativity. (It occurs to me that this is a variation on Jack Williamson's "Humanoids" theme - a more subtle destruction of humanity by those who wish it nothing but good.) The root, I suppose, is his - I think, ill-chosen - decision to integrate the robot novels with the Foundation series. Since robots are missing from the Foundation trilogy, something must be done to remove them, or at least render them invisible, and the dream of C/Fe has to die. (For that matter, the Baley novels aren't quite consistent with the Susan Calvin stories, either; the world depicted in "The Evitable Conflict" could not easily have turned into the world of The Caves of Steel, I think.) I had not realized until this reading that Giskard's story heralds the Gaia of the later Foundation novels, but I think that Gaia itself was a mistake. The Mule as a freakish mutant is a far more interesting character, I believe, than the Mule as a refugee from a planet of telepathic robots. (Or am I misremembering? I read Foundation's Edge but did not keep it, and I did little more than browse in one or two of the later Foundation novels, so my memory may be faulty; but that is the impression I have.)
Do I wish The Robots of Dawn had never been written, as I do 2010? No. But I think the 1957 version would have been more artistically satisfying, in some respects.
