Isaac Asimov's Galactic Empire Series
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The Galactic Empire Series is three novels by Isaac Asimov:

• The Stars, Like Dust (1951)
• The Currents of Space (1952)
• Pebble in the Sky (1950 - his first novel)
• Blind Alley (1945), short story in The Early Asimov

They are only very loosely connected, if at all. Their only common point is Asimov's idea of a future galactic empire, and this is barely mentioned in Pebble in the Sky.

Interestingly, the short story Blind Alley is the only story set in the Foundation universe to feature non-human intelligence (not counting robots and Gaia).

Asimov later integrated them into his all-engulfing Foundation series. Some contortion was required to explain how the robots of the Robot Series are almost completely absent from the Empire novels. In reality, this was due to the magazine editor Asimov worked with at the time (John W. Campbell) disliking robots in science fiction, and discouraging (forbidding?) Asimov from including them.

The original article can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov's_Galactic_Empire_Series.
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