wildsumac

I read this book in October, but I didn’t find the time to sit quietly and write a review of this amazing book.

Caution: spoilers everywhere

This is the second novel in the Robot Series, by Isaac Asimov, but I catalog it as the third book, after I, Robot and The Caves of Steel. I, Robot is not a novel, but a collection of short stories, but it serves as a great introduction to the positronic brains that compose robots.

In The Caves of Steel we are introduced to the main protagonists of the Robot Series, Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw. They are in charge of resolving the mystery of the murder of a Spacer on Earth. A Spacer is a human that was born and lives on one of the 50 planets colonized by humanity, other than Earth.

After the mystery is resolved, two years pass (if I remember correctly), and that's when The Naked Sun takes place.

In The Naked Sun, a “fetologist” has been murdered on the planet Solaria, and the Spacers, unaccustomed to murder, call Elijah Baley to investigate and find the culprit. They call him specifically at the request of Aurora (another Spacer planet), and R. Daneel Olivaw joins him. Daneel is a humanoid robot, by the way, the only one of its kind.

The issue is that Earthpeople live in domes underground, and they never go outside, so they have developed severe agoraphobia. The Spacer worlds are all open space, causing great difficulty for Elijah to move around. Furthermore, the Solarians are very individualistic, and each person lives in their own state, without human contact, but surrounded by thousands of servant robots that cater to their every whim.

It is in this context that Elijah and Daneel arrive at Solaria. They are hosted in a state all by themselves, and the Solarians expect them to conduct the investigation via trimensional viewing (like 3D hologram video calls). Elijah makes an effort at the start, but then decides that he needs to be in person to interview the people involved in the mystery. The Solarians protest, but Elijah gets his way most of the time.

The deceased “fetologist” leaves a surviving wife, Gladia, whom everyone believes is the assassin. This is because the only time when two persons get together on Solaria is when they are married. And even so, they only have physical contact when they have sex, strictly for procreation, which is seldom.

Gladia appears to be the one who could have killed her husband. It’s unthinkable for the Solarians to see anyone in person, and the robots are governed by the Three Laws of Robotics, which prevent them from harming a human being. So Gladia is the only logical option, but Elijah is not convinced.

Following the same methodical analysis of The Caves of Steel, “plainclothesman” Baley goes everywhere and speaks to everyone, making extensive deductions along the way. As he has a severe case of agoraphobia, R. Daneel wants to prevent him from going places in the open to prevent him from harm. But Elijah won’t stand for a robot limiting him, so he traps Daneel in the house and goes around alone.

One of his trips is to the nursery. That’s where the babies are brought up and taught in the ways of the customary Solarian isolation until their independence. This is where we are first introduced to the complexities of the First Law of Robotics:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm

—First Law of Robotics

As the Spacers consider themselves superior, they reach the conclusion that Earthpeople are “sub-human”, which causes an incident where a robot allows a kid to shoot an arrow at Elijah, narrowly missing. This topic is much more explored in the later novel Robots and Empire.

Later on, Elijah goes to the Delmarre state, the house of the murder victim and scene of the crime. Gladia, his late wife, still lives there. She’s repressed and depressed, but not sad for her husband’s death. She knows that she’s missing something in life but doesn’t know what. On the contrary to the rest of Solarians, she has a more open mind, and she has an interesting back-and-forth with Elijah, even going for a walk outside. The poor man sees the sunset and becomes aware that he’s Outside; the agoraphobia kicks in and he faints.

At the end of the novel, having resolved the mystery, Gladia dares to touch Elijah without gloves, which is a very nice scene. I liked Gladia in this book and ended up loving her throughout the next books in the Robot Series.

I really liked this book. I'm reading the whole Foundation universe books, and this one is one of my favorites so far.

#books