SPOILER-laden "order to read REF series" thread

[J-Sun]

There are at least two threads which discuss the appropriate reading order of the Asimov Robots/Empire/Foundation superseries but I thought it might be useful to have one which can be spoilery just to discuss it freely (which might be fun in itself) and to better help fans help new potential-fans get started in other contexts. It might also help clarify how to explain things to them in a non-spoilery way - at least, I'd like some help with that. This was sparked by a tangent in another thread that more or less begins here and the basically non-spoilery threads are:

http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/12893-order-of-foundation-series-isaac-asimov.html
http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/39026-order-of-robot-empire-foundation.html

Ordinarily, series are written in order and are best read in order though some don't matter. Even those series which are written out of order can often be read in internal order - Anderson, Schmitz, Laumer, and others have written this sort. But I think the controversy with Asimov comes because his remains a pretty linear history in which most parts are distinct building blocks rather than recurrent episodes and, most importantly, there's The Weld.

I'm looking up some dates to make sure but the contents and connections are from memories so apologies for any errors and please correct them.

In the 40s and 50s Asimov wrote independent stories and lesser series and his two main series, the Robot and Foundation stories. In 1950, I, Robot came out, collecting the bulk of the Robot stories to that point, slightly recasting one to better fit the series and writing a framing narrative between the others. From 1951-3, the eight Foundation stories were collected in three volumes with a prequel story written to lead off the first collection of five, with the next two containing two long tightly connected stories each. To my knowledge, other than the insertion of the first story, no changes were made to the text. In 1954 and 1957 he wrote the two Robot novels featuring Baley and Olivaw. Most of the stories had featured Susan Calvin, with some featuring Donovan and Powell and some featuring one-shots.

Meanwhile, in 1950-2 he'd written the Empire novels. The Foundation trilogy is strictly interconnected and (but for the prequel story) in order both written and chronological. In the first Robot novel, Baley definitely meets Olivaw and it's definitely their first case and Baley is of a certain grade. In the second, they know each other, it's their second case, and Baley has received a grade bump. So there's a clear order for those. But the Empire novels have no plot/cast connections and the only real way to order them is by the strength of the empire depicted in the books. But the empire is that which precedes the Foundation.

So there it stood until 1964 and the strange appearance of The Rest of the Robots which was a mix of the two already-published novels and eight previously uncollected Robot stories. But in 1966 you could get Eight Stories from The Rest of the Robots by itself to go with I, Robot and your two Robot novels.

Either way, at this point, we had some Robot stories that could clearly, if loosely, be seen to be the backstory to the Robot novels. On the other hand, we had a Foundation trilogy with the Empire trio clearly, if loosely, serving as the backstory to them.

So, obviously the reading order is:

I, Robot & 8 Stories
The Caves of Steel & The Naked Sun

The three Empire novels in whatever order
The Foundation Trilogy

And it makes no difference which of the two groups you start with and even the two halves of each are relatively independent and optional, especially as the Robot stories are written before, during, and after the novels, and the Empire novels were written slightly out of order within themselves and were written after the Foundation books, though set before them.

So there it stood until 1982. More Robot stories had been written all along and had appeared in various collections but nothing about the superseries-to-be changed as such until The Complete Robot and Foundation's Edge were released the same year. The Complete Robot is kind of unfortunate in ways. First, it broadens the definition of "robot story" to include some that hadn't been considered robot stories and it resorts all of them into thematic groups which requires throwing away the framing material of I, Robot. So, ironically, The Complete Robot was over-complete and incomplete. (Not to mention that Asimov wrote many Robot stories after it that are worth seeking out but there's never been a Compleat Complete Robot.) But, by design, it replaces the two earlier collections. And Foundation's Edge brought a new style to the series and was conceived as a novel from the start but simply extended the series. As 1983's Robots of Dawn extended the Robot novels with a third case for Baley and Olivaw, with a similar change in style but little else.

So far, so good. Now the order is simply:

The Complete Robot
The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, Robots of Dawn

The three Empire novels in whatever order
The Foundation Trilogy & Foundation's Edge

Also, despite the long gap and the changed style, I've always thought the new additions were excellent in their ways and only extended what we had.

Then... The Weld. 1985's Robots and Empire was a book I enjoyed but not as much as the others and has come to seem more flawed in retrospect probably because it was trying to do so much apart from simply tell its own story. It hardly has its "own story", existing mainly to begin tying the disparate series together. And now spoilers really begin. We connect the irradiated Earth of Pebble in the Sky with the Robots, thereby putting Earth explicitly into Foundation, and robots into Empire and, thus, Foundation. Then 1986's Foundation and Earth joins the Robots and Foundation in no uncertain terms. And, having nowhere left to go, 1988 brought us the first of the two Foundation prequels, Prelude to Foundation, which completes the blend of Robots and Foundation.

It's this that makes Asimov's superseries so different from many others and generates a lot of the specific confusion even among fans. (Any new reader may be confused about the order of any series.) His series meant one thing from 1940 to 1983 and all of that was completely recast and came to mean something else from 1985-1993. And it's the 1940-1983 period that got him all the fame, entered the historical SF consciousness, won awards, including 1966's "Best All-Time Series", and so on. If you read the Foundation prequels first, you begin with the idea of Robots controlling things which isn't remotely what the Foundation was originally about. It requires the Robot history to end in Empire and Foundation, which was originally open. If you read Foundation and Earth before the Robot novels, the best moment in the whole book is likely meaningless because you don't know who Daneel is. If you read the prequels first, instead of meeting The Raven through the eyes of Gaal Dornick (itself a prequel story) and then becoming familiar with the hologram pseudo-deity (the original magazine concept), you meet the young student Hari. So, with these books, everything becomes welded together much more tightly, reading order becomes much more debatable (yet much more important), and the entire series and each of its parts mean something different.

So, personally, for a first reading, I advocate the same second list as above, followed by the post-83 books precisely in written order and viewed as the "Weld series":

1985 Robots and Empire
1986 Foundation and Earth
1988 Prelude to Foundation
1993 Forward the Foundation

So. Apologies for the length and what'd I get wrong? Or right? Or askew?

 

[Darkday]

From 1951-3, the eight Foundation stories were collected in three volumes with a prequel story written to lead off the first collection of five, with the next two containing two long tightly connected stories each. To my knowledge, other than the insertion of the first story, no changes were made to the text.

Actually there are quite a few differences between the magazine versions and the book versions, albeit minor. There is a great page on this topic whose URL I'm not allowed to post since I only have 14 posts at the moment. I'll post it when I'm able to.

Some information taken from this page:

The novelette version of “Foundation” was originally the beginning of the series, and thus it opens with a scene depicting Hari Seldon at a secret meeting of his group. This scene does not appear in any book version of Foundation.

In the original short story [The Traders], the main character is named Lathan Devers! In the book version of Foundation, this was changed to “Limmar Ponyets”.

In the books, each Foundation story is preceded by an excerpt from the Encyclopedia Galactica (specificially, “the 116th edition published 1020 F.E.”). A few other Galactica excerpts also appear within the stories. But on their original magazine appearances, none of these stories included excerpts from the Encyclopedia Galactica.

“Dead Hand” names Hari Seldon's planet of birth as Siwenna! [...] In the book version, “The General”, [...] the excerpt from the Galactica [...] says Seldon was born “on Helicon, Arcturus sector”.

 

[Darkday]

Here's the URL: http://www.pannis.com/SFDG/TheFoundationTrilogy/theFoundationStories.html

 

[J-Sun]

Thank you very much for that information and link! Very interesting stuff. Minor or not, I had no idea there'd been so many changes so I definitely learned some stuff. If you have any more details like that about the Foundation stories or any of the rest of Asimov's work, or if anyone else does, I'd love to hear it.

It's also very scary: I've read books within the last few years or so that I'd completely forgotten I'd read until I've come across notes on them saying so. Yet, when I read the last line of the original opening I thought to myself, "wait a minute" and got out my Foundation book and, sure enough, it's how the story that was sort of altered/expanded from those opening paragraphs also ends. I somehow actually remembered having read that line.

 

[Darkday]

I once made a list of all the stories which Asimov reworked:

Already mentioned, but listed here for the sake of completeness:

• The Foundation stories
• Robbie

Then there are the three story versions that were published in The Alternate Asimovs:

• Grow Old Along with Me
• The End of Eternity
• Belief

The following versions are probably less known:

• I'm in Marsport Without Hilda: For the publication in Nine Tomorrows (1959), Asimov was forced to censor (bowdlerize) the story. The publications in Venture Science Fiction (November 1957) and Asimov's Mysteries (1968) are uncensored.
• The Heavenly Host: The original publication in Boys' Life (December 1974) had 3,400 words. Asimov then expanded it to 7,900 words and published it as a chapterbook (1975).
• To Tell at a Glance: Asimov wrote this story in 1976 for Seventeen, but they rejected it. So he cut the story in half and sold it to the Saturday Evening Post, who published it in February 1977. The original version was eventually published in The Winds of Change (1983).

There are also the Silverberg expansions of "Nightfall", "The Ugly Little Boy" and "The Bicentennial Man", but as far as I know, Asimov merely agreed to the expansions and did not contribute to them.