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Replying to
Don’t forget, the original story was 3 long magazine short stories. Pure pantsing, not plotting. It inherited some grand narrative arciness from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, but otherwise was made up in a shitposty way as the prolific guy was racing to log the words.
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Rome history buffs too overstate their influence of Gibbon. A far bigger influence was Cold War 1950s-80s milieu. Including nuclear war, which is critical to the plot. It’s the reason the Spacer/Settler schism happens, earth is abandoned, and robots except for Daneel disappear.
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Pebble in the Sky originally had a “bad physics” nuclear fallout premise that was later corrected while being retconned into Foundation timeline in Robots and Enterprise as the result of an “ultimate weapon” by Spacers to make earth uninhabitable. Asimov explains it in a preface.
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In fact the entire Asimoverse is the result of prolific pantsing coupled with masterful retconning. It’s not conceived as an organic whole like LOTR or Harry Potter. It kinda grew like slime mold around his influences. A fox larping hedgehog. An Austrian in Keynesian clothing.
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Cleon is basically doing the tropey emperor-walkabout-incognito thing in this bit. Okay as interpolation but a bit dull. Luminism as a religion feels vaguely Ursula-Le-Guin-ish. Mythology of 3 goddesses, cyclic time etc.
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I honestly don’t get the complaining. I’m a huge Asimov fan/nerd and I’m enjoying every minute of this.
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The last bit with Demerzel and Helima mildly bothers me. Zeroth vs First law conflicts are vaguely implied in the books, but this was so on the nose… but the extreme emotion is an interesting way to cash out law-conflict stresses. In the original robot books you just get stasis.
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Replying to
That this so wildly conflicts with the laws of robotics leads me some wild conclusions: The 3 laws aren’t in this universe (why break them so dramatically without belaboring them first?) The writers assume we know the 3 laws The writers don’t even know how to use the 3 laws
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