but, i'm not really excited about it, or have much of an urge to type about it. and, i don't want this to turn into a chore.
i think the key point is really realizing the 25 year difference. whereas the asimov that i knew and i respected was writing for a contemporary audience in the 40s and 50s, there were dramatic social changes that occurred in the 60s and 70s, and asimov would seem to be required to adjust to them for this book published in the 80s, if not voluntarily than no doubt by his publisher. so, that 25 year time lag is a sort of a clean break, conceptually. they're the same characters to start, but this novel is really twice as long as it needs to be because it needs to house certain types of additional characters, which people are expected to be more able to relate to, as per the norms of mass marketed fiction that developed at that time. so, the aloof and likeable solarian (gladia) is transformed into a somewhat disgusting, contemptible slut that has nothing worthwhile to say, including about her orgasm (why put that in your robot novel? who wants to read that kind of smut? who cares?). further, they had to include some kind of 70s hipster kid with ironic facial hair that's unable to get laid, to try to appeal to a certain segment of reader. none of this adds anything to the specific story or to the broader arch of the narrative and probably should have been cut - if the truth no doubt wasn't that it was included on the urging of the publisher, in the first place. so, asimov becomes a sad reflection of the empty society that he's writing from, at the dawn of reaganism. hey, could you prove reagan wasn't a robot? he survived a bullet, didn't he?
so, i'm not reacting well to the more contemporary style, i'm finding myself missing the classic asimov that's above gratuitous sex and not interested in empty plot development. in the 40s and 50s, science fiction was just a mechanism for dystopian literature, so it was not fundamentally different than other types of literature, really, it just had a different setting. and, that would have been true through the 60s (you can really see that in the initial run of star trek, which frequently played on everything in the traditional canon of literature, from shakespeare to classical mythology), up until star wars, which sort of broke everything and left the genre in a juvenile state of focusing on special effects, like any other adventure film. this third robot novel was written and published in the early 80s, in the midst of the major shift in the genre that was happening. the reality is that it appears that asimov was actually coerced (perhaps by large dollar figures) to return to writing fiction within the context of the blockbuster scifi films of the late 70s and early 80s, given that he was responsible for so many of the ideas underlying them. for that reason, the text seems to lack the more allegorical writing of his earlier years - it's just a run-on story about the adventures of an earthling and two robots, designed for the all-of-a-sudden very large market for vacuous adventurist science fiction.
this text also goes over a lot of previous ideas for the apparent reason of acting as a subtle means of advertising for his previous stories. the calvin references work their way into the story, but they don't add anything to it.
that said, asimov isn't entirely embracing this new reality, either. the critique of the sex life of aurorans seems to be a reflection of asimov's views on sexuality within the bourgeois elite in new york city, specifically, in the 70s. asimov seems to be suggesting that bourgeois american culture has overdone it on the sex, and reduced it to something meaningless and boring - so much so that the promise of unhindered sex with robots offers an escape from the ubiquitous mundanity of sex with people. i have to admit some sympathy with this perspective. this marxist critique of bourgeois sexuality (in an auroran society that is otherwise broadly communist - the same confusing juxtaposition that is in the second novel) is the closest thing to a purpose in the text, although he drops the narrative about a third of the way in, and instead detours off into pointless character development, to expand the length of the text for no real apparent reason, other than to try to create these characters that are supposed to generate feelings of identity in the reader. i might actually suggest that asimov may have been trying to write a third robot novel in the same framework as the first two (they all represent a potential failure point leading to a communist dystopia: the overcrowded kibbutz of earth, the marxist alienation of solaria and the empty bourgeois hedonism of vanguardist aurora), but got cut-off halfway by a publisher trying to create something that would appeal to star wars fans, who co-opted the novel into just aimlessly going on for hundreds of pages of empty action/adventure nonsense. sadly...
so, if the point of the story is that it's supposed to be about the emptiness of capitalist excess and unchecked bourgeois hedonism, it is even less cohesive and less developed than the second volume. but, the idea is there - if just barely. i can identify no further discernible purpose in the 430 page paperback, besides to waste the reader's time. the middle section really wasn't necessary - he could have gone from gladia to amadiro and maybe should have.
i think it's important to point out that asimov is repeatedly pretty rough on baley, and sort of passive aggressive with daneel, indicating that he might not be so excited about these characters any longer. i'd strongly suspect he was toying with killing them off. in fact, daneel has a very minor part in this story; the more important robot is giskard. baley is repeatedly treated as a fool that is unable to fend for himself, as a consequence of living in the kibbutz; there are frequent allusions to his child-like state, to the robots as his caretakers and even to gladia, at one point, as his mother. baley is not killed in the end, but he doesn't appear in the fourth installment, which i'm now dreading reading.
in terms of his broader narrative, asimov introduces a conflict between the pro-auroran globalists and the pan-humanity humanists that the humanists win, in this installment. you'd have to imagine that asimov (acting director of the humanist society) would be most sympathetic to humanists. it's a bit of a hint as to who represents his own views, in truth - something that might be different in 1980 than it was in 1955. asimov's subtle slights on baley may be another indication that he's changing hosts in the story, so to speak, and that he now looks down on baley, whereas he previously saw him as his own voice. asimov's globalists - a vanguard elite that puts itself first and looks down on the broader swath of humanity - is not all that different than the contemporary concept of "globalist", which comes from a strange merging of far-left and far-tight anti-elitism. asimov seems to want to present humanism as a truer from of egalitarianism, a less corrupt concept of liberalism and a more authentic left. fastolfe's "decency" is presented in this context of representing humanism. asimov and i may quibble over details as to what the anti-vanguard left ought to look like (he was a liberal, and i'm an anarchist), but we seem to agree on the need to present a counter-left as a movement against vanguardism. but, once again, this is about leftist infighting - it's not some broad ideological discourse. only the primitivist utopians on earth seem to offer any opposition to the spread of communism throughout the galaxy.
so, i'd have to broadly describe this as "disappointing", but i really do get where it's coming from, and in some ways it might have been impossible to avoid. i suppose that if you want to read the whole thing then you can't skip it, but i'll tell you: you're not missing much if you did.
