Context
The story is set long before Pebble in the Sky, though it was written one year later. The Trantorian Empire is not directly mentioned — it would be located far away, having been settled not long beforehand, and before its first great wave of territorial expansion. Earth's radioactivity is explained here as the result of an unspecified nuclear war. This contradicts what Asimov later wrote in Robots and Empire. One could suppose that history has become muddled over the intervening centuries since the final Robot novel — "many of the inhabitants of the planets near the Horsehead Nebula now believe it was named after an explorer called Horace Hedd." Other theories exist. And when Biron pretends on Rhodia that he comes from Earth, the Earth is not recognized, and he has to identify it as "a small planet of the Sirian Sector".
In contemporary terms, however, Asimov wrote the Empire series in the early years of the Cold War, when a nuclear World War 3 seemed a realistic future; one whose widespread and enduring radioactive contamination might be remembered, at least in folklore, for thousands of years. By the time he wrote Robots and Empire, this was no longer so. However, in the intervening years he had mentioned the contamination, and the resulting abandonment of Earth, in many stories. He therefore retained both of these elements but gave a different cause than nuclear war.
Read more about this topic: The Stars, Like Dust
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