Isaac Asimov's Utopia

Isaac Asimov's Utopia is a science fiction novel by the American writer Roger MacBride Allen, published in 1996 and set in Isaac Asimov's robot universe.

The book takes place five years into the governorship of Alvar Kresh, who is married to a roboticist, and it is as interested in the administration of a doomed planet as in its rescue. The comet plan comes from Davlo Lentrall, and its difficulty is not a matter of physics: the trajectory would bring the comet down on top of the city of Valhalla, which is where the new-law robots live, and an intelligence broker named Norlan Fiyle has sold word of the scheme to the settlers, to a radical faction and to the robots themselves before anyone in authority was ready. The novel's argument is about how a society decides who is expendable when a technical fix is the only way to survive, and the three-law and new-law robots, which have already been established as a division in the series, are the machinery for that argument. Allen was licensed to continue Asimov's world after Asimov's death, and this is the third of the three novels he wrote in it.