Robots and Empire is a science fiction novel by the American author Isaac Asimov, published by Doubleday Books in 1985.

In the novel, Asimov depicts the transition from his earlier Milky Way Galaxy, inhabited by both human beings and positronic robots, to his Galactic Empire.

But Asimov's later Galactic Empire is populated by many quadrillions of human beings on hundreds of thousands of habitable planets and by very few robots (such as R. Daneel Olivaw).

During these two centuries, Earth-people have overcome their agoraphobia and resumed space colonization, using faster-than-light drive to reach distant planets beyond the earlier "Spacer" worlds.

Gladia's homeworld and the 50th-established of the Spacer planets, Solaria, has become empty of all human inhabitants, although millions of robot servants remain.

Baley, gains Gladia's help in visiting Solaria, to investigate the destruction of several "Settler" spaceships that made landings there and to capture the presumably unsupervised robots.

Giskard predicts, correctly, that by forcing humanity into leaving the Earth, vigor will be reintroduced into humankind and the new Settlers will populate space until all the governments of the interstellar colonies form a "Galactic Empire".

Meanwhile, aboard a starship, Gladia, Daneel, and Giskard visit the planets Solaria and Baleyworld before reaching the Earth, where this novel's climax takes place.

Though not explicitly stated, there was the clear implication that the world's being mostly radioactive with humans precariously surviving in limited uncontaminated areas was the result of a nuclear war hundreds or thousands of years before the time of the plot.

It was, however, pointed out by critics that such an extensive use of nuclear weapons as to leave persistent and widespread radiation even after centuries would have completely destroyed all life on Earth at the moment when it took place.