How to read the whole history behind Asimov's books

Submitted by Ignacio on
If you read most of Issac Asimov books you'll find most of them contribute to the general story of mankind conquer of the universe

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Since I was a child my favorite kind of novels had been science fiction ones, and one of my favorite authors is Issac Asimov. One of the things I like the most about his work is how he built a whole timeline and universe where he tells the history of mandkind and his conquer of the universe. When reading his books this is not obvious, but once you read several of them you'll start to see it.

Reading his books the first two would be:
From this two the one I liked the most is the second one. In it Asimov explains why his universe has no aliens. You might also ask why there are no robots in the future when he wrote so much about them, but that's a different story which I will address at the end.
The we have some books with short stories about robots:
These are all compilations. Within these Asimov explains how he envision robots evolving and integrating into society.
Cronologically wise the history continues with Elijah Baley series of books. He is a human detective from earth and partner with R. Daneel Olivaw (a robot from the outer worlds):
The last book of this serie shows a second wave of colonization which is the seed for the galactic empire. Within this galactic empire he will build his famous foundation triology.
There are a couple of books that happen within the empire era:
These books show unrelated stories that happen within the same era.
Finally we have his most famous series: Foundation
I included when they were publish because it shows how Asimov filled the gaps to complete the story.

This timeline does not have all the books, he has a lots of unrelated books (within his science fiction work). But it is impresive to see how he completed the story in a non-cronological order. It is like Asimov had the whole story on his head and as I was writing it he was completing the story of the whole universe. To be fair there are gaps and the fans usually cover these gaps.

To wrap up I want to share the books where it is explained why there are no humanoid robots on the universe of the galactic empire. If you read these books:
You'll learn why. I will accept emails asking, but I don't want to spoil it over here.