The departure to the stars

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The rise to the stars (original title: The Robots of Dawn , title of the first German translation: Aurora or Der Aufbruch zu den Sternen ) is a science fiction novel by the American author Isaac Asimov from 1983 . The German first edition appeared in 1984. It is the third novel about the policeman Elijah Baley and the humanoid robot R. Daneel Oliwaw. As with its two predecessors, Asimov also uses the Whodunit concept here. The novel was nominated for the Hugo and Locus Awards.

action

In Asimov's vision of the future, humanity is split into the overpopulated earth and the spacers living on 50 sparsely populated planets . On earth there are efforts to colonize other worlds, but this would only be possible with the technical help of the spacers . On Aurora , the dominant spacer world, the influential robotist Han Fastolfe supports these efforts because he believes that the long-lived and robot-cared for spacers are unable to colonize other planets. His opponent is Kelden Amadiro, who is planning a further expansion from Aurora alone with the help of the robots and without the earth's inhabitants.

Against this background, the New York police officer Elijah Baley is called to Aurora . He is brought to Aurora by the robots Giskard Reventlov and Daneel Olivaw, whom he knows from earlier (see The Steel Caves ) . Crimes are extremely rare there and Baley is supposed to investigate the mysterious burnout of the positronic brain of the humanoid robot Jander Panell, the only existing humanoid robot next to Daneel. The likelihood that this happened by accident is close to zero. But the only one who could have intentionally caused the burnout is its builder and Earth supporter, Han Fastolfe. Apart from him, no one knows how the humanoid robot brain works. Always accompanied by Daneel and Giskard, Baley finds out that Gladia Solaria, whom he also knows from before, has considered the robot Jander to be her husband. Further, that Kelden Amadiro was about to discover the secret of the humanoid robot brain. He can convince the chairman that Amadiro's intensive questioning of the robot has significantly increased the likelihood of the blow, and the charges against Fastolfe are dropped.

Before returning to Earth, Baley confronts the nonhumanoid robot Giskard with his realization that he has telepathic abilities and has "killed" Jander. He was involved in the construction of the humanoid robots and knew them as well as Fastolfe himself. He wanted to prevent Amadiro from being able to build humanoid robots and use them to colonize space. According to Fastolfe's plan, this should be done from earth.

Classification in Asimov's work

In the 1950s, Isaac Asimov wrote two novels about Elijah Baley and the robot Daneel Oliwaw ( The Steel Caves and The Naked Sun ), in which the three robot laws are discussed. The classic Foundation trilogy , which deals with the decline of a galaxy-spanning empire and the fictional science of psychohistory , also dates from this period . The novels The Dawn of the Stars (1983) and The Galactic Empire (1985) combine the old robot novels with the Foundation novels. Han Fastolfe has the vision of a science that, analogous to the laws of robots that determine the behavior of robots, determines the behavior of humanity or at least makes it predictable, psychohistorics. The zeroth robot law, in which the welfare of mankind takes precedence over that of the individual, is formulated and the expansion of mankind, which will lead to the empire of Trantor, begins.

review

"Because if there were only two years between the murder on Solaria and the roboticide on Aurora, there were three decades between the appearance of" The Naked Sun "and that of" The Robots of Dawn ". Between 1957 and 1983 the world had changed, science fiction had changed, and last but not least Isaac Asimov had changed. […] The novel does not follow up seamlessly on its predecessors, but it continues them in the best possible sense. The novel reflects the change in the world in three decades [ sic ], but of course you can - like everything from Asimov - read it as an exciting story without any background: You definitely get your money's worth. "

Publications

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 1984 Award Winners & Nominees | Science Fiction & Fantasy Books by Award | WWEnd. In: worldswithoutend.com. Retrieved July 26, 2011 .
  2. ↑ Bookmark: "The Departure to the Stars" by Isaac Asimov - Review of the German new edition in Corona Magazine No. 151 of October 5, 2005, accessed on July 6, 2012