thousand years from now, the teeming billions of Earth will huddle far from the reach of the sun's rays in gigantic underground cities. They will live, work and die in caves of steel, subsisting on cultivated yeast and wondering how many more people the old planet can support.
Off-world, on interstellar planets settled by an earlier generation of bolder Earthmen, the story is different. Cautious, almost paranoid Spacers live on sparsely populated worlds in relative luxury. They have everything that the Earthers don't: long lives, food and--perhaps most importantly of all--robots. Earthers hate Spacers and they hate their inhuman, job-stealing robots even more.
And, as if the future of Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel isn't troubled enough, he throws in yet another problem: a Spacer's murder.
The Spacer, a leading roboticist with a secret mission, has been killed on Earth, in a Spacer enclave known as Spacetown. It's an impossible murder: the only way into Spacetown is through its heavily guarded entrance, and no one saw the murderer come or go. There are actually several other entrances, but they require the murderer to have walked through open plains. No City-dwelling Earther could conquer their fear of the outside long enough make the crossing, but the Spacers insist that none of their people could have committed the crime. So who could have done it?
Forced to solve this conundrum is Elijah Baley, a typical agoraphobic, robot-hating Earther who's also a detective. He's partnered with a Spacer, R.
Daneel Olivaw, who happens to be exactly the sort of robot that Baley hates and fears.
A troubled but hopeful future
Isaac Asimov is a grandmaster of science fiction, and over the course of his long life he wrote more than 500 books. The Caves of Steel was his 11th novel, and it provided the cornerstone of his Robot series (which in later years he merged with his equally classic Foundation sequence).
In Baley, Asimov does not create a perfect detective. He's a cop who has plenty of hunches, and many of them are wrong. He knows that Olivaw can't hurt him thanks to the Three Laws of Robotics built into him and his kin, but he still fears that robots will take his job and leave him worse than homeless. However, he never lets his failures or shortcomings stop him. Instead, he overcomes his prejudices, grudgingly accepts help from his robotic partner, and uses solid reasoning and detective work to determine the murderer's identity.
The novel sets up a world poised at the edge of stagnation and decline, one in which the technology robots represent is in equal parts feared and loathed. Unlike a cyberpunk novelist, though, Asimov does something about it. In one of his introductions to The Caves of Steel, he wrote, "Even as a youngster, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance. To me, it always seemed that the solution had to be wisdom."
This outlook pervades all of Asimov's novels, and as his Robot novels continue with The Naked Sun and The Robots of Dawn, readers are introduced to a human race that is finally growing up. It's this sense of hope that makes Asimov's books so enjoyable--and re-readable--50 years after they were written.
