[REVIEW] Isaac Asimov, Caves of Steel
Apr. 18th, 2006 02:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI have read and I do like the stories of I, Robot, and when I was much, much younger I did read the Foundation trilogy along with Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth. Despite this, I hadn't gotten around to reading The Caves of Steel. I remedied this lack over the weekend.
I was pleasantly surprised to find, after almost a decade's lapse, that Asimov's prose style held up quite nicely. The Foundation trilogy books were written at an earlier point in his career than this 1953 novel, before Asimov developed his polished and personable style. There's a nice rhythm to his language, and Asimov picked telling details nicely. It was actually quite enjoyable to read this book because of this style.
The plot worked, too. The pairing of human Earther cop Lije Bailey with sophisticated Spacer robot R. Daneel Olivaw worked as a microcosm of the conflicts between Earth and the Spacer worlds. It seems that the Machines of "The Evitable Conflict" have planned badly in producing an immiserated world of eight billion people; that, or their plans for the future required this immiseration, to produce Medievalism so as to finally produce a second more successful wave of galactic colonization. This background, in turn, serves as the frame for an enjoyable detective story that, like the best stories of the genre, assimilates the large-scale events surrounding the protagonist-investigator to the persons and places of said character's life.
Some things have dated. The conservatism of gender roles and the homogeneity of the Earth of the Cities does strike me as a bit off, and Asimov's choice of "Fe" to denote a technological culture instead of the more modern "Si" shows its age. That said, The Caves of Steel still works.
I was pleasantly surprised to find, after almost a decade's lapse, that Asimov's prose style held up quite nicely. The Foundation trilogy books were written at an earlier point in his career than this 1953 novel, before Asimov developed his polished and personable style. There's a nice rhythm to his language, and Asimov picked telling details nicely. It was actually quite enjoyable to read this book because of this style.
The plot worked, too. The pairing of human Earther cop Lije Bailey with sophisticated Spacer robot R. Daneel Olivaw worked as a microcosm of the conflicts between Earth and the Spacer worlds. It seems that the Machines of "The Evitable Conflict" have planned badly in producing an immiserated world of eight billion people; that, or their plans for the future required this immiseration, to produce Medievalism so as to finally produce a second more successful wave of galactic colonization. This background, in turn, serves as the frame for an enjoyable detective story that, like the best stories of the genre, assimilates the large-scale events surrounding the protagonist-investigator to the persons and places of said character's life.
Some things have dated. The conservatism of gender roles and the homogeneity of the Earth of the Cities does strike me as a bit off, and Asimov's choice of "Fe" to denote a technological culture instead of the more modern "Si" shows its age. That said, The Caves of Steel still works.
