Death of the Author: One of Asimov's favorite stories, "The Martian Way", was a way of using his claustrophilia as an attack on Joseph McCarthy. In it, a McCarthy counterpart named "Hilder" is almost able to become Global Administrator at the cost of space development. Nuclear "proton micropiles" are used to produce energy almost for free, and are used in pumped steam rockets to colonize the solar system - so Hilder whips up scare reports on how space travel will eventually turn the Earth into a desert. Asimov's Martians, being immune to Space Madness due to their upbringing as claustrophillic Space People, are able to make a three-year trip to Saturn, retrieve a cubic mile of ice from its rings, and return in time to make a complete fool of a visiting bureaucrat who states for the record that Earth cannot spare a single drop of its one and a half quintillion[1] tons of water. As an attack on McCarthy, it flopped. As a modern-day attack on environmental alarmism, it works.
Fanon Discontinuity: Foundation and Earth is basically just an excuse for a big crossover with the Robots series and doesn't make much sense compared to the earlier Foundation books.