The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov
Apr. 7th, 2007 01:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
Solaria: where robots ruled, and Earthmen lived in terror.
The Solarians have become Spacers with a civilisation based on robots instead of slaves, while the Earthmen have burrowed into the ground, roofed over their cities, and are terrified of everything outside their caves of steel. And now, the first murder for two hundred years has been committed.
Who has killed whom?
I read my dad's copy of this book (bought in 1960!), and found The Blurb on the Back to be a little misleading. The basic set-up is this: Elijah Baley, first seen in The Caves of Steel, is told by his superiors that he's got to leave Earth and go to Solaria to investigate a murder - an act completely unknown to them and which they're not able to do themselves. He's teamed up with the Robot Daneel (also from The Caves of Steel and together they try to find the culprit.
Only, as with much of Asimov's work, this isn't so much about investigating the crime, as:
(a) investigating how his Laws of Robotics can be made to fail; and
(b) looking at the problems likely to be faced by future Earth generations.
Compared to his other work however, he is more interested in (b) than in (a). In The Caves of Steel Asimov looked at overcrowding due to overpopulation and how robots could make life easier, in The Naked Sun, he's looking at the flip-side at how robots can change your social outlook to the point of not being able to bear close contact with other humans.
It's an interesting book, more so for looking at the optimism and futurology of the 1950s. However there were things that bothered me - particularly the fact that Baley refers to every robot as "Boy". I think that this is more due to my 21st century sensibilities - when I hear that word used in a command context, I instantly associate it with racism and I don't think that's what Asimov intended. I also found Baley's agrophobia to be too much of a plot device - he can bear the outside and then not bear the outside at strategic moments to push the plot - and when the culprit is uncovered, the rationale for the murder is explained away too quickly and doesn't really seem to make much sense in the context of what we've discovered during the course of the book.
The Verdict:
An interesting read but not up to Asimov's other work. More a curiosity than a must-read.
Solaria: where robots ruled, and Earthmen lived in terror.
The Solarians have become Spacers with a civilisation based on robots instead of slaves, while the Earthmen have burrowed into the ground, roofed over their cities, and are terrified of everything outside their caves of steel. And now, the first murder for two hundred years has been committed.
Who has killed whom?
I read my dad's copy of this book (bought in 1960!), and found The Blurb on the Back to be a little misleading. The basic set-up is this: Elijah Baley, first seen in The Caves of Steel, is told by his superiors that he's got to leave Earth and go to Solaria to investigate a murder - an act completely unknown to them and which they're not able to do themselves. He's teamed up with the Robot Daneel (also from The Caves of Steel and together they try to find the culprit.
Only, as with much of Asimov's work, this isn't so much about investigating the crime, as:
(a) investigating how his Laws of Robotics can be made to fail; and
(b) looking at the problems likely to be faced by future Earth generations.
Compared to his other work however, he is more interested in (b) than in (a). In The Caves of Steel Asimov looked at overcrowding due to overpopulation and how robots could make life easier, in The Naked Sun, he's looking at the flip-side at how robots can change your social outlook to the point of not being able to bear close contact with other humans.
It's an interesting book, more so for looking at the optimism and futurology of the 1950s. However there were things that bothered me - particularly the fact that Baley refers to every robot as "Boy". I think that this is more due to my 21st century sensibilities - when I hear that word used in a command context, I instantly associate it with racism and I don't think that's what Asimov intended. I also found Baley's agrophobia to be too much of a plot device - he can bear the outside and then not bear the outside at strategic moments to push the plot - and when the culprit is uncovered, the rationale for the murder is explained away too quickly and doesn't really seem to make much sense in the context of what we've discovered during the course of the book.
The Verdict:
An interesting read but not up to Asimov's other work. More a curiosity than a must-read.
