Of Robots and Empire Asimov

Of Robots, Empires and Pencils:

The Worlds of Isaac Asimov Reconsidered

Reviewed by Sally Morem

 Human society is the most astonishing and perplexing of all the universe's life-forming, self-organizing processes in its ability to transform the creative and mundane acts of thinking beings into systems that span the globe and stretch out into space. Isaac Asimov, as a writer  and a man, was vitally  concerned with the workings of human societies.
He dreamed of far-flung interstellar empires run by fragile and misguided humans, with robots made in their image, guiding them away from destruction. But, for all their imaginative world building, Asimov's Foundation and Robots series of stories and novels must be considered magnificent failures."Magnificent" in the sense of the boldness with which Asimov described galactic  civilization  without  all  the hackneyed,  Buck Rogers  slam-bang space fighting against bug-eyed aliens. "Failures" in the sense that a centralized galactic empire run by a planet-bound bureaucracy and a future Earth wholly controlled by robotic minds stretch believability to the breaking point and beyond. But, to be fair, let's try to understand the literary strictures Asimov had to face as a young writer in the SF genre of the 1940s

Of Robots and Empire Asimov