2026 in Books

March

June

The Razor's Edge:

• It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on the earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water.

• We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmerciful and yet with what insight the very young judge us.

Robots and Empire:

• “They won't go. We value our bodies, which are strong, healthy, and capable of surviving in strength and health for nearly forty decades. Earthmen can place no value on bodies that wear out in less than ten decades, and that are riddled with disease and degeneration even over that short period of time. It doesn't matter to them if they send out millions a year to certain misery and probable death. In fact, even the victims needn't fear misery and death, for what else do they have on Earth? The Earthpeople who emigrate are fleeing from their pestilential world knowing well that any change can scarcely be for the worse. We, on the other hand, value our well-wrought and comfortable Planets and would not lightly give them up." - Amadiro

• Earthmen feared and hated robots, and yet Elijah, knowing full well that Daneel was a robot, treated him only as a person. Spacers, on the other hand, who loved robots and were never comfortable in their absence, would never think of them as anything but machines.

• She had come to a sense of equilibrium on Aurora, a way of allowing life to pass quietly. Meal by meal, day by day, season by season, it had been passing, and the quiet had insulated her, almost, from the tedious waiting for the only adventure that remained, the final one of death.

• ‘Daneel, I wanted you here out of a selfish desire to see you, to see for myself that you haven't changed, that there is a breath of the great days of my life still existing, that you remember me and will continue to remember me.’ - Elijah Baley

Gladia watched Baleyworld, as it receded, with emotions wondered quite different from those with which she had watched it approach. It was precisely the cold, grey, miserable world now that it had seemed at the start, but there was a warmth and life to the people. They were real, solid.

Solaria, Aurora, the other Spacer worlds, those she had visited and those she had viewed on hypervision, all seemed filled with people who were insubstantial - gaseous.

No matter how few the human beings who lived upon a Spacer world, they spread out to fill the planet as molecules of gas spread out to fill a container. It was as if Spacers repelled each other.

...

Settlers clung together, leaving large desolate about them as the price of the clinging; that is, until population increase filled it. A Settler world was a world of people-clusters, of pebbles and boulders, not gas.

Why was this? Robots, perhaps! They lessened the dependence of people upon people. They filled the interstices between. They were the insulation that diminished the natural attraction people had for each other, so that the whole system fell apart into isolates.

It had to be. Nowhere were there more robots than on Solaria, and the insulating effect there had been so enormous that the separate gas molecules that were human beings became totally inert so that they almost never interrelated at all. (Where had the Solarians gone, she wondered again, and how were they living?)

And long life had something to do with it, too. How could one make an emotional attachment that wouldn't tur slowly sour as the multi-decades passed; or if one died, how could another bear the loss for multi-decades? One learned, then, not to make emotional attachments, but to stand off, to insulate oneself. On the other hand, human beings, if short-lived, could not so easily outlive fascination with life. As the generations passed by rapidly, the ball of fascination bounced from hand to hand without ever touching the ground.