Sunday, April 28, 2013

Novel - The Caves of Steel - Isaav Asimov (published in 1954)


Isaac Asimov is one of the most famous science fiction writers of all time. The number of fiction and non-fiction books that he has written number in the hundreds, more than 500 books of different genres. Asimov is mostly famous for his science fiction novels, but he has written a number of others books, almost all of them on science. Along with other authors such as Arthur C Clarke and others such as Robert Heinlein, he was one of the most famous science fiction writers of all time. His most famous legacies include the 3 laws of Robotics (meant to ensure that humans have control over robots) and for the Foundation series of books. For many science fiction readers, Asimov would have been the first author whose books they may have read. He had also won many of the science fiction awards that were there, and one of his short stories, Nightfall was very popular with critics. For those who have read the books, there are many aspects of the books that are not science fiction per se, instead they are a beautiful description of the society of the future.
Asimov was born as a Russian Jew in the period just after the First World War, with the exact date of birth unknown (sometime between 1919 and 1920). When Asimov was very young, his family moved to the United States and settled in New York. During the Second World War, he was working in a Navy station stateside, and joined the Boston University School of Medicine. He started writing short stories in 1939, and also with novels in 1950. Within a couple of years, he also went into writing non-fiction books. Over a period of time, he wrote a large number of books, with an increasing concentration on science books rather than non-fiction. In fact, as he mentioned in the Foundation Series, he had to be literally forced by his publishers to write some of the later Foundation books. Unfortunately, after writing a huge collection of books, many of them incredible books, Isaac Asimov died in 1992.
The Caves of Steel was the first in a series of novels that starred the human investigator Elijah Baley and his humanoid robotic partner, Daneel Olivaw. The book was first published as a series in Galaxy Magazine, over the last quarter of 1953, with the hardcover editing being published in 1954. This was the book that showed a time when travelers from earth (using hyperdrive) managed to colonize external planets. However, these colonizers, over a period of time managed to control disease, developed the science to live much longer and grew very rich, comfortable with robots to help them with their lives. At the same time, on earth, there was a reverse process. Humans retreated into living in large cities of steel (and an aversion to open space or outside), with severe restrictions and control on all facilities, hating those who had gone outside (the Spacers) and hating the control they had on earth, and most of all hating their machines, the robots.





In this setting, Elijah Baley is a policeman, with some of these biases as well. He has a family, and due to his status as a policeman, he has some facilities that others don't have, but there are many that he does not have because of his current rank. And then, a disaster occurs. A Spacer, one who wants people on earth to start going outside again, to other worlds, is killed just inside Spacetown (the guarded location on earth where Spacers live, and where people from earth are only allowed after being disinfected). He has been killed using a blaster, but it is a proper murder mystery since it is not easy to detect as to who did the murder. The disaster and opportunity for Elijah is that his boss, the Commissioner, wants Elijah to take up the murder investigation, and his partner will be a robot who looks just like a human, called R. Daneel Olivaw (the R stands for Robot).
There is no evidence of how the murder occurred and it is now upto Elijah to do all the investigations to figure out why the murder occurred. He has to fight with unknown people, work against an organization that wants nothing to do with Spacers and with robots and is looking to implicate Elijah in a situation where he will be accused of destroying valuable property. How does he do it ? Is he successful ?


Novel - The Caves of Steel - Isaav Asimov (published in 1954)

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