Robots and Empire

Robots and Empire is a science fiction novel by the American writer Isaac Asimov, published in 1985. It joins his robot novels to the stories of the Galactic Empire and Foundation.

The Spacers are the descendants of the first settlers, fifty planets of long-lived people who keep robots and look down on the crowded, short-lived population of Earth. Kelden Amadiro, an old Spacer who lost an argument with the Earth detective Elijah Baley long ago, has never given up the idea of destroying Earth, and this time he has a plan. Standing against him are the robots Daneel Olivaw and Giskard Reventlov, who have been quietly working for centuries to keep humanity alive and who are now forced to reason about the good of a species they cannot fully understand. Asimov uses the book to explain why a galaxy full of robots becomes a galaxy with almost none, and the answer turns on a decision made by machines about what human beings are for.

It is one of the books in which the author stitched his separate futures together into a single history.