The books Nemesis and The End of Eternity may or may not be linked to the Robot/Empire/Foundation books - and the author was tantalizingly ambiguous about their status. The 'Second Foundation Trilogy' by Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, and David Brin was also authorized by his estate, but the series was conceived after Asimov's death.Īsimov himself was fond of linking his works together, but left gaps in what was 'official'. Tiedemann and Mickey Zucker Reichert were approved by Asimov's estate, but Asimov himself had nothing to do with these. Roger MacBride Allen's trilogy of books about the robot Caliban is a bit of a special case: The good doctor approved outlines for these books before he died, so an argument could be made for including them in the Asimov canon. Similarly, the Robot City books (which I haven't read) appear to be more of an attempt to riff off of the concept of Asimov's robots.

The tone of much of this book seems to be one of affectionate pastiche more than an attempt to add to Asimov's body of work. Some of the stories set in the Robot/Foundation/Empire universe even contradict Asimov's stories. The stories in the multiple-author anthology 'Foundation's Friends' were written while Asimov was alive, but are of questionable 'canon'. Asimov's works can almost certainly be considered canon, but there's really very little guidance after that. And as you'll see, this may have been left deliberately open to interpretation.Īlso, this isn't a case of a large franchise with someone passing down edicts, it's a different situation entirely.

If you're looking for an official word on what's canon and what isn't, or perhaps even levels of canon as there are in Star Wars, you'll not find anything like that with Asimov's works. There is no clear answer to this, and probably never will be.

The second foundation trilogy