I read The Caves of Steel perhaps twenty years ago, when I first discovered Asimov’s work and devoured all of the Foundation novels plus quite a few of his short stories. In 1982, Asimov was persuaded to return to fiction, and added more novels to his best-known series, Foundation (which uses something akin to what we’d now call mathematical computer modelling to predict human behaviour on a mass scale), as well as two more Robot novels, The Robots of Dawn (1983) and Robots and Empire (1985). Asimov essentially gave up writing fiction in favour of non-fiction (which he acknowledged he much preferred writing) in 1958, the year after The Naked Sun appeared, with only a handful of works – including the Hugo- and Nebula-winning 1972 novel The Gods Themselves – being published over the next 24 years. First published in 1957, The Naked Sun is the second of Asimov’s four ‘Robot’ novels, following The Caves of Steel three years earlier. He died, at the age of seventy-two, in April 1992.In Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun, social distancing – as we would now call it – is not just a useful ‘othering’ device to underscore the difference between Earth and another planet: it is an integral part of the novel’s plot.
Named a Grand Master of Science Fiction by the Science Fiction Writers of America, Asimov entertained and educated readers of all ages for close to five decades. During his legendary career, Asimov penned more than 470 books on subjects ranging from science to Shakespeare to history, though he was most loved for his award-winning science fiction sagas, which include the Robot, Empire, and Foundation series. Daneel Olivaw, to solve an incredible murder that has rocked Solaria to its foundations.The victim had been so reclusive that he appeared to his associates only through holographic projection.Yet someone had gotten close enough to bludgeon him to death while robots looked on.Now Baley and Olivaw are faced with two clear impossibilities: Either the Solarian was killed by one of his robots-unthinkable under the laws of Robotics-or he was killed by the woman who loved him so much that she never came into his presence! About the Author Isaac Asimov began his Foundation series at the age of twenty-one, not realizing that it would one day be considered a cornerstone of science fiction. Book Synopsis A millennium into the future, two advancements have altered the course of human history: the colonization of the Galaxy and the creation of the positronic brain.On the beautiful Outer World planet of Solaria, a handful of human colonists lead a hermit-like existence, their every need attended to by their faithful robot servants.To this strange and provocative planet comes Detective Elijah Baley, sent from the streets of New York with his positronic partner, the robot R.
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