Who's who in Asimov

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

A guide to the Robot, Empire and Foundation novels.

Many of the novels which make up Isaac Asimov's science fiction share not only a common milieu and chronology, but many common characters and concepts. In particular, the fourteen novels which deal with robots, the Galactic Empire and the Foundation describe a future galaxy with a self-consistency not unlike that of Tolkien's Middle Earth.

This is all the more remarkable since, when Asimov wrote in the early 1940s the short stories which would become Foundation, he clearly did not plan that they would eventually become central to a mythology describing the colonization of a galaxy from a small and troubled planet, the human and ethical conflicts involved, and the beginnings of a galactic superconsciousness, the writing of which would be spread over some fifty years.

This Who's Who provides an index to the people and places of Asimov's work, and attempts to draw together some of the threads of the characters and concepts which evolve over a long period of mythological history. It is based on material from all of the Robot, Empire and Foundation novels, together with those of the Robot short stories which are referred to in the larger works, and with one reference to The End of Eternity (1955).

The references given for each entry break down as follows:

Multiple references to the same book have been abbreviated, with references to different books separated by semi-colons. Short stories alluded to are named.

Key to references

  1. The Caves of Steel (1954)
  2. The Naked Sun (1957)
  3. The Robots of Dawn (1983)
  4. Robots and Empire (1985)
  5. The Currents of Space (1952)
  6. The Stars Like Dust (1951)
  7. Pebble in the Sky (1950)
  8. Prelude to Foundation (1988)
  9. Forward the Foundation (1993)
  10. Foundation (1951)
  11. Foundation and Empire (1952)
  12. Second Foundation (1953)
  13. Foundation's Edge (1982)
  14. Foundation and Earth (1986)