Storyline: 4/5 
 Characters: 2/5 
 Writing Style: 3/5 
 World: 2/5 
 Asimov manages a surprising level of consistency across his Foundation and Robots books. Through the thirty-five years in which he produced these nine core novels, he retains his own Golden Age style and worldview. Looking back over the others in the two series, however, I also see how varied the books are. The Caves of Steel had the best worldbuilding of any of the others, Foundation and Empire poorly handled just about everything, whereas Foundation and Earth had the best characterization of both sets. I was pleased to find this the most interesting storyline of all the books. I had enjoyed the last entry into the Foundation series more than I enjoyed the previous four, and likewise enjoyed this concluding Robot book more than I did the first three. 
 A lot of the satisfaction in this book is structural. Structural with regard to this story's place in the overall framework of the series, specifically. This, as well as the last Foundation book, are where immense histories, backstories, and characters all get their interconnections and explanations. Because the Robot books are essentially prequels to the Foundation books, we readers get the satisfaction of seeing pieces fall into place and answers to great mysteries revealed. I also liked the social and technological questions Asimov was dealing with in this volume. Perhaps he really did intend some then real-world allegory or message, but I read it as him speculating about the future of society and technology when we can finally travel to distant worlds and make use of robot labor. On the negative side of the scale, Asimov still relies far too much on dialogue to move the story along, and the detective-story mystery deductions continue to come off as unreasonably convenient. The worldbuilding here presented very little that was new. Most of it was sociological (which I liked and welcomed) but repetitive. 
 I read through the Foundation novels in the order they were published and then the Robot books in their publication chronology. I wish, in hindsight, that I had treated them as a single series and read them in order of publication. That would be (1) Foundation, (2) Foundation and Empire, (3) Second Foundation, (4) Caves of Steel, (5) The Naked Sun, (6) Foundation's Edge, (7) Robots of Dawn, (8) Robots and Empire, and (9) Foundation and Earth. I would have skipped over the Galactic Empire trilogy (published before Foundation) altogether. I also never read the original I, Robot short story collection, and I do sometimes wonder what I missed out on by skipping that.