Book review: The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun and The Robots of Dawn

Both classic Asimov of the Foundation era. The Caves of Steel is set on Earth; Our detective Hero Elijah Baley does so well that the Spacers invite him for a reprise in The Naked Sun on Solaria. My copies came from the web; they appear to be out of copyright, and so I couldn't get a Kindle text, but you can just read it for free. Or they might be in copyright and that just a rip-off, who knows.

Much like CIP, who re-read The Stars Like Dust, I read this so long ago I could barely remember the plots or the incidents. I did remember the murderer for TCOS but that didn't matter. And no review of these books set millenia in the future that feature technological marvels like hyperspace travel and intelligent robots would be complete without noting their pathetic display tech: a 24 inch filmbook reader is considered luxury, ho ho. Perhaps a fairer criticism is that the Caves of Steel are set millenia in the future yet the Earth's population is - I forget exactly - I think about 20 billion; that seems too little, too stable, for such a time period. Also, I've realised that the one I do vaguely recall of that other "series" is The Currents of Space.

The books are pleasantly inverses of each other in a way, and could be said to embody a hopeful attitude; that closed societies can be opened. Within that is the murder-mystery, which I could tell you about but I won't; and the story is nicely told; rather better than, say, Nemesis.

Addendum: The Robots of Dawn. Found here. This one, per wiki, is from 1983. There are some somewhat unsubtle intimations of Foundation-era things: no robots, for example (how yer goin' ter explain that inconsistency, eh, eh? Ans: by the slightly implausible idea that the "second wave" of settlement from Earth would deliberately take no robots, to avoid becoming dependent on them); or HF musing on founding a thing that he might call psychohistory. There are some distinctly unsubtle sexing-ups (masturbation in space! Sex with robots! People "offering" themselves to each other! Elijah gets off with Gladia!) which rather jar with the otherwise fairly standard Asimovian style. Indeed in many ways there is astonishingly little stylistic change in the 30 year interval. And the story, as usual for A, is good; it rolls happily along. The "killer" (beware: spoilers) turns out to be suitably hard to guess; I am doubtful it is done fairly (I thought it was going to be HF), but then again I wasn't really tring to guess, so didn't mind.