Spacer (Asimov) - Wider Connections

Wider Connections

In Asimov's short-story collection I, Robot, it is mentioned that the first extra-solar Earth colonies had recently been settled, in the wake of Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan's first historic hyperspatial jump. In the novel The Robots of Dawn, it is established that the planet Aurora was originally known as "New Earth," during the first few centuries following its colonization by Earthmen (in the Tau Ceti star system), and was the first planet settled by Man outside of Earth's solar system. Therefore, it can be inferred that Aurora/New Earth is that same very first extrasolar colony settled during the timeframe of the stories featured within I, Robot, during the mid-21st Century.

Asimov's novel Nemesis hints that the Spacers may have been descendants of human beings selected by a non-human intelligence for their mental characteristics. However, except for a brief mention in Forward the Foundation, the Nemesis plotline is entirely unlinked with the rest of Asimov's science-fiction canon. (The internal logic of the Robot-Empire-Foundation saga demands that robots be present on Earth prior to the Spacer worlds' colonization, yet Nemesis contains no robots, making the continuity difficult to accept.)

Further, another story within the story arc establishes the Spacers' mastery of myco-food (food derived from fungi), which they then retain all through history up to their inclusion in the Imperium on Trantor in the sector of Mycogen. The Spacers control of myco-food makes the farming operations of Solaria seem more puzzling, until we remember that Solaria was aberrant even by Spacer standards and remained so in the later book Foundation and Earth as a real example of menace to the Second Foundation itself.

In a somewhat similar vein, Mark W. Tiedemann's "Robot Mystery" trilogy also portrays the Spacers as a group genetically distinct from Earthpeople and their Settler descendants. Tiedemann's trilogy, set between The Robots of Dawn and its sequel Robots and Empire, attempts to update Asimov's work to reflect more recent scientific and science-fictional speculation, for example explaining the lack of nanotechnology in Asimov's robot-ridden society. According to Tiedemann's Aurora (2002), the cumulative effects of genetic alterations (due partly to nanotech devices since abandoned) separated Spacers from the rest of humanity, to such an extent that the word "human" in the Three Laws of Robotics may no longer apply to them.

In his Lucky Starr series of juvenile (or in modern parlance, "young adult") novels, Asimov describes the "Sirians" in terms which resemble those for the Spacers.