Mother Earth (novelette) - Context Within Asimov's Universe

Context Within Asimov's Universe

With fifty Spacer worlds led by Aurora, this tale seems to bridge the gap between the early robot stories and The Caves of Steel. Aurora is also described as having begun as a "Sirian sector colony", pointing to the later Galactic Empire. No individual robots appear, but positronic robots are part of the background.

However, the short-story ending does not seem consistent with situation in The Caves of Steel. The reader might view it as a "first draft" of sorts, with ideas that were later changed. Asimov would re-shuffle ideas at times — the short story Victory Unintentional has a non-human civilisation on Jupiter, which is incompatible, even though the story features positronic robots obeying the Three Laws. In Mother Earth, the latest of the Spacer worlds is Hesperus, settled from Faunus, although this does not necessarily contradict the history of Solaria provided in The Naked Sun — at one point in the story itself, the number of Spacer worlds is literally given as "some fifty worlds," not a firm, even fifty. The problem can be easily reconciled by supposing that at the period depicted in the later novels, Solaria had only recently (as in the past few centuries) been settled by mankind. This, in fact, would seem to be the case, according to later books, as Solaria was said to have been founded as a colony of one of the pre-existing Spacer worlds, not by colonists from Earth. Later in Foundation and Earth, when the protagonists locate the remnants of Melpomenia, they find a memorial to the Spacer worlds, consisting of seven columns, each with the names of seven Spacer worlds carved into them (which would make 49 worlds), except for the last column, where it was clear that an eighth planet, Solaria, had been added after the fact.

Asimov himself is ambiguous about the link, saying:

What interests me most about "Mother Earth" is that it seems to show clear premonitions of the novels Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, which I was to write in the 1950s."