The Story So Far

Some 3,000 years in the future (incidentally about as much a distance as between us and the time of pharaohs), humanity has made due, albeit precariously. Centuries ago the race split into two groups: those bound to Earth and those who went off to colonize a couple dozen planets, these latter folks coming to be called Spacers. There’s been a longstanding resentment between Earthmen and Spacers, which is bad news for Elijah Baley since there’s been a murder, and the victim, one Dr. Sarton, is a Spacer. Baley is a New York police detective, rank C-5, and he’s been put in charge of the investigation, with promise of promotion up a whole two ranks. But of course, there’s a catch. See, there’s a outpost called Spacetown, home to a group of Spacers living on the outskirts of New York, and while the Sarton case falls under New York jurisdiction, the police will need Spacetown’s cooperation; the best way to do this, apparently, is to hook Baley up with a robot partner, “named” R. Daneel Olivaw. R. Daneel is an impressive creation, being a lifelike robot who appears at first glance to be perfectly human, and yet whose protocol abides the three laws of robotics, albeit with a “justice-desire” circuit implanted in him. R. Daneel seems to be the ideal police detective that Baley can’t possibly be, which is itself a problem, because if R. Daneel solves this mystery before Baley does, the result would just as bad as if Baley were to let the case run cold.

Despite his disdain for both Spacers and robots, Baley is actually a moderate by the standards of Earthmen. Prejudices against Spacers and robots run pretty deep and fierce on Earth, and not totally without reason, since human life here is restricted to capital-C Cities, mostly autonomous city-states, in which privacy is very much a privilege and where the danger of becoming “declassified” (restricted to the lowest standard of living) is very real. Baley himself has vivid memories of living in poverty as a kid after his own dad got declassified, and he doesn’t want that future for his wife and son. The Spacers, meanwhile, seem to be enjoying easy lives on low-populated planets, and with some technicology that outclasses what even the best scientists of Earth have to offer. R. Daneel is of course a walking example of Spacer superiority, which doesn’t help his new partnership with Baley. The thing is that while there are many people in these “caves of steel” who wouldn’t mind taking aim at a Spacer, the circumstances of Dr. Sarton’s murder make such that a human managing to go outside New York and entering Spacetown from the rural landscape is unlikely. Earthmen have been raised from birth to be claustrophiles, which is to say they love enclosed spaces, to the point where even windows are rare in the Cities. This all makes Baley wonder if maybe a robot could’ve done the crime.

Enhancing Image

It’s not supposed to be funny, but I did sort of laugh at the end of the first installment, if only because I already know the book’s ending and so went in knowing Baley’s accusation that R. Daneel is secretly Dr. Sarton is completely off-base. The ensuing scene is comical, maybe intentionally, as Baley tries and failes disastrously (even embarrassing Commissioner Julius Enderby, who happens to be there) to convince the Spacers of a conspiracy to stage a fake murder so as to justify Spacer robotics taking over human jobs (including Baley’s own) on Earth. Much of the second installment sees Baley in some way convinced R. Daneel had to do with the murder, either by being Dr. Sarton in disguise (i.e., being actually a human) or by somehow being able to kill Sarton in violation of the three laws. R. Daneel proving he is indeed a robot is one of the most memorable moments in the book so far, in what seems to anticipate a similarly famous scene in Terminator 2 in which Arnie cuts open his forearm to reveal all metal and wire. It’s such a shocking moment for Baley, if not the reader, that the poor guy passes out from the sight. Even worse, this whole spectacle should by all rights guarantee his being taken off the case—which, of course, ends up not happening. The Spacers have taken a sort of strange liking to Baley, and even R. Daneel, despite the target of Baley’s accusations, holds no grudge against him (but then how can he, being a robot?) but instead respects his critical thinking, even if said thinking was wrong.

An underdiscussed part of this novel is how Asimov deals with dystopia (or rather averts the idea of dystopia) by comparing the livestyles of Earthmen and Spacers, each sucking balls in its own way. Another way to put it is that despite the population issue on Earth, life in the “caves” isn’t all that bad, especially if you’re agoraphobic or reluctant to go outside. The government of New York, along with presumably the other Cities, functions on a kind of state socialism that isn’t quite Soviet-esque—for one because there doesn’t seem to be the problem of censorship. Money seems to have been abolished and private property is hard to come by, although there’s still very much the existence of a state and a class hierarchy; but even then, those who have been declassified are still entitled to food and shelter, if only of the most rudimentary sort. (Said food is vast-grown slop, with “yeast” being used as like a curse word in this future.) The Spacers, meanwhile, enjoy much more open space, much lower population density, and a generally higher standard of living on the so-called Outer Worlds; but this, too, comes with its own price. For one, the Spacers are super-weak to germs and disease, such that even the common cold can kill one of them, and as such Spacetown is a germaphobe’s paradise. More disturbingly, the Spacers run a eugenics program in which infants with defects or “deformities” (Baley wonders, himself quite disturbed by all this, as to what counts as a “deformity” for the Spacers) are euthanized. This has resulted in an equally troubling population problem for the Spacers, since if anything there are too few humans living among the dozens of worlds.

Asimov goes to great lengths to depict a plausible (for the most part) future in which there are basically two kinds of Earthmen: those who are sympathetic to robots to some degree (naturally these people are a small minority), and those who are some degree of “Medievalist,” which a) is most of humanity, and b) does not mean what the word means to us in the present day. Baley and Enderby are both Medievalists, but not of the same sort, which (spoilers) will only become more apparent as we reach the novel’s conclusion. Baley doesn’t trust robots, and indeed spends a chunk of the second installment pestering a roboticist about the possibility of R. Daneel having murdered Sarton, but also his hard outer shell regarding robots is shown to wither a bit as the novel progresses. A bigger problem is that there may be a conspiracy of Medievalists in New York who are looking to either “kill” R. Daneel or drive hm and the Spacers out of the City. Jessie, Baley’s wife, might just be part of said conspiracy, with Jessie already knowing R. Daneel’s true “identity” and, as with most people, being resentful of robots. This is all a bit of a red herring, as I know in advance, but this installment does end on a pretty good note.

A Step Farther Out

Is The Caves of Steel cyberpunk? Not quite, but it’s uncanny how much this one novel is able to predict what would become standard tropes of the movement, for being published in 1953. The only other notable cyberpunk-adjacent work I can think of off the top of my head that predates Asimov’s novel is Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction.” People reading The Caves of Steel for the first time today might think it quaint and unsurprising, since the human-robot detective duo thing has been done many times since then, and Asimov goes to answer questions that have long since been made redundant in SF writing. Asimov explains things which nowadays are no longer considered worth explaining. There’s also the quaintness of the notion that a population of 8 billion people might result in the otherwise interesting setting Asimov invented for his Earthmen, but that’s just a miscalculation one should expect from vintage SF. Once again I had read the installment in almost a single gulp, which speaks to how much Asimov’s style resonates with me, and also how immaculately paced and unceasingly inventive this novel is, even taking its faults into account.

See you next time.