Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition)

by James Gunn

  I was very proud of the stories I was writing now [1953]. It seemed to me that they were much more deftly written than my stories of the 1940s. I think so to this day.

  It seems to me that most people associate me with the 1940s and think of the positronic robot stories, the Foundation series, and, of course, "Nightfall," as the stories of my peak period. I think they're all wrong. I think my peak period came later in 1953 and the years immediately following.

  By now, after all, the pulpishness in my writing had completely disappeared. That had been taking place all along, through the 1940s, but between what Walter Bradbury taught me and what I had learned at Breadloaf, the change accelerated under my own deliberate prodding.

  My writing became ever more direct and spare, and I think it was The Caves of Steel that lifted me a notch higher in my own estimation. I used it as a model for myself thereafter, and it was to be decades before I surpassed that book in my own eyes.

  What had brought Asimov's capabilities to fruition? Partly, one can guess, experience. Asimov had been writing science fiction for fifteen years and getting it published for fourteen when he began work on The Caves of Steel. Some writers, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. E. van Vogt, begin writing at the top of their form and never do it much differently; others, like Robert A. Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon, continue to improve until they attain full command of their writing skills and creative drives. For writers like the latter, the process seems to take about ten years, depending perhaps upon the age at which the writer begins to publish and the amount of writing done. Heinlein, for instance, started writing in 1939 at the age of thirty-two and came into his mature period in 1949. The first adult novel in which he demonstrated his integrated abilities, The Puppet Masters, was published in 1951 (two years before The Caves of Steel was serialized in Galaxy). Asimov, who was only eighteen when he went to see John Campbell for the first time and nineteen when his first story was published, was thirty-three when he began writing The Caves of Steel.

  Asimov also had gained confidence as he matured. He had become a successful author in many ways. Instead of creeping "pallid and frightened" into Campbell's office, he now was able to breeze into the office of any science-fiction editor in New York and "expect to be treated as a celebrity." His science fiction was beginning to appear in books with regularity, and he had some assurance that every novel he wrote would be published as a book. I, Robot and Pebble in the Sky had been published in 1950; Foundation and The Stars, Like Dust, in 1951; Foundation and Empire and The Currents of Space, in 1952 two books a year, alternating between Doubleday and Gnome Press. And his Lucky Starr juvenile novels, written under the pseudonym Paul French, were beginning to appear from Doubleday, starting with David Starr: Space Ranger in 1952. Second Foundation and Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids were in the works for 1953. His first scientific book, Biochemistry and Human Metabolism, which was neither particularly satisfying (because it was a collaboration) nor particularly successful (but showed Asimov the possibilities of science writing), had been published by Williams & Wilkins in 1952. Asimov also had completed a non-fiction book on his own, first called The Puzzle of Life and then The Chemistry of Life. Two publishers had rejected it, but he knew now that he could write nonfiction, and another publisher had approached him to do a book about science for teenagers.

  Asimov had gained confidence in worldly ways as well. He had been promoted to assistant professor at the Boston University School of Medicine at the end of 1951, and he was beginning to think of himself as a writer rather than the research chemist he had considered himself for the last dozen years. He had earned $1,695 from his writing in 1949, more than $4,700 in 1950, $3,625 in 1951, and "an astonishing" $8,550 in 1952, the last amount being half again as large as his university salary, now $5,500. He had $16,000 in the bank; he owned his own car; and he and his wife were thinking about buying a house. They had a son, two years old.

  He had matured in other ways. His social insecurity, particularly with women, had eased with success, and he had adopted a good-humoredly "gallant" approach to all women of all ages. He had even enjoyed his first extra-marital encounter and felt he had acquitted himself well.

  What novel was the focus of all these maturing influences?

  The Caves of Steel is placed in a time about three thousand years in the future. Earth is a homogeneous society of eight billion people who live in Cities with populations of twenty million or more. The open country outside the Cities is given over to agriculture and mining, performed entirely by robots. Earthmen, as Asimov calls them, have worked out efficient systems of living and supplying the necessities of life and accommodating themselves to the pressures of everyday existence. On fifty other inhabited planets, however, live the Spacers, once settlers from Earth but now quite different from Earthmen: the Spacers have normal lifespans of up to 350 years, are free from infectious diseases, control their births not only in quantity but in quality, and, though few in number, are militarily powerful because they have many machines and robots and depend upon interstellar travel. Upon previous occasions they have sent down their "gleaming cruisers from outer space" into Washington, New York, and Moscow to collect what they claimed was theirs. They have constructed a "Spacetown" adjacent to New York. In Spacetown, a Spacer has been murdered. The plot revolves around the investigation of that murder by Elijah ("Lije") Baley, a detective on the New York City police force with a C-5 rating, who is forced by the Spacers to accept as a partner a humanoid robot, R. Daneel Olivaw.

  The novel was based on an idea suggested by Horace Gold. Gold had serialized The Stars, Like Dust (Tyrann) beginning in the fourth issue of Galaxy. Campbell, however, had published The Currents of Space, Asimov's subsequent novel, in part at least because Asimov felt guilty about the fact that six of the first eight issues of Galaxy had contained Asimov fiction. Gold wanted Asimov's next novel. He suggested a robot novel. At first, Asimov didn't want to do it; he didn't know if he could carry a whole novel based on the robot idea. Gold suggested an overpopulated world in which robots are taking over human jobs. Asimov thought that was too depressing and was not sure he wanted to handle a heavy sociological story. Finally, in view of Asimov's liking for mysteries, Gold suggested that "he put a murder in such a world and have a detective solve it with a robot partner. If the detective doesn't solve it, the robot will replace him."

  In his autobiography Asimov recalled that "when I wrote it [The Caves of Steel], I did my best to ignore this business of robots replacing human beings." Fear of such replacement had been ridiculed in I, Robot, where the difficulties of introducing robots on Earth was caused by fundamentalist religious groups and labor unions, and prejudices against robots were voiced by silly, ignorant, or malicious people. Asimov's resistance to the concept was understandable. If the novel was to work, however, much of the philosophic, even historical, development of the robot in I, Robot had to yield to new imperatives. Every person, even sensible persons such as Baley, had to be anti-robot, and yet robots had to be common enough on Earth for Earthpeople to fear their takeover of human jobs. After "Robbie" in I, Robot, Asimov had never allowed robots openly on Earth. This may explain, in part, why The Caves of Steel is set so far in the future. Asimov further rationalized the use of robots on Earth by placing responsibility for their increasing presence on Spacer pressure. As for robots replacing human workers, "that was typically Gold and not at all Asimov," Asimov said, " but Horace kept pushing, and in the end, some of it was forced in, but not nearly as much as Horace wanted.''

  Gold was at least as good in suggesting ideas to writers as Campbell. He gave Frederik Pohl the idea for "The Midas Plague" and Alfred Bester the idea for The Demolished Man, which became a turning point in Bester's science-fiction career. Now he gave Asimov the idea for what may, with some justice, be called Asimov's best science-fiction novel. What pleased Asimov most about it, however, "was that it was a pure murder mystery set against a science fiction background. As far as I was concerned it
was a perfect fusion of the two genres, and the first such perfect fusion. A number of people agreed with me in this."

  The Demolished Man, which is a murder mystery and, in a sense, a detective story, had appeared in Galaxy eighteen months before The Caves of Steel, but it was not a formal mystery. Other murder mysteries had been published in which science fiction played a part: Anthony Boucher's Rocket to the Morgue (1942), for instance, or Mack Reynolds's The Case of the Little Green Men (1951). Scientific detectives were common earlier in the century, such as R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke. Sam Moskowitz devoted a section of his Science Fiction by Gaslight to "Scientific Crime and Detection," including stories such as L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace's "When the Air Quivered" from The Strand Magazine (December 1898), and Warren Earle's "In Re State vs. Forbes'' from The Black Cat (July 1906). Moskowitz also cited Edwin Balmer and William B. MacHarg's Luther Trant, Psychological Detective and Arthur B. Reeve's Craig Kennedy. But none of those stories was like The Caves of Steel, in which the murder mystery and the subsequent attempt to unravel the mystery and discover the murderer function as the central structure around which all the other events arrange themselves.

  Baley is assigned to the case by an old friend, Julius Enderby, the Commissioner of Police, because the situation with the Spacers is so delicate and Enderby can trust Baley's discretion. Moreover, Baley's loyalty and sense of duty register so high that he can be relied upon to work with a robot.

  The case is complicated by the fact that entry to Spacetown is controlled by the Spacers, who put every entering Earthman through a decontamination process that Earthmen consider demeaning. No weapon can be sneaked into Spacetown. Daneel, however, has a possible solution: the Spacer was killed by a group of conservatives called the Medievalists, who want Earthmen to return to a simpler way of life and who resist the introduction of robots. Daneel points out that one of them, with a weapon, could have left New York from one of the hundreds of ancient exits and reached Spacetown by crossing open country. Baley says that is impossible for an Earthman; conditioned by life within the City, he could not cross open country for any reason. A robot, on the other hand, could cross open country but could not kill because of the First Law.

  As in every well-made detective story, Baley considers a number of suspects and possible explanations. Because Daneel has been constructed to resemble his maker, the murdered Spacer Roj Nemennuh Sarton, Baley at first accuses Daneel of being Sarton, but Daneel proves he is a robot by opening his arm to reveal his mechanical workings. Later, still desperate to put the blame on the Spacers, Baley accuses Daneel of committing the murder and hiding the blaster in his food sac, but Earth's leading robot expert, Dr. Gerrigel, by questioning Daneel, finds that his First Law is intact.

  Sammy, the office robot who replaced one young office worker, is found by Dr. Gerrigel with his brain destroyed. Baley is likely to be accused of Sammy's destruction because Baley complained about him and had access to the "alpha-sprayer" that did the destruction. Baley has only an hour or so before the Spacers terminate the case. He confronts Enderby with evidence that the Commissioner himself is guilty both of Sarton's death and of Sammy's destruction. Enderby had planned to destroy Daneel and had Sammy carry the blaster across open country to Spacetown. Enderby shot Sarton, thinking he was Daneel, and returned the weapon to Sammy before the crime was discovered.

  The murder and its detection, though ingenious, are not the primary interest of the novel. No one ever gets worked up about Sarton's death. The Commissioner is agitated and later this becomes one clue to his guilt but the Spacers are calm. The possible consequences are more important than the murder itself, and the consequences are science fictional. First, the Spacers have the power to inflict indemnities on Earth if they are offended; and second, the entire New York police force will be humiliated and Baley may lose his job, his hard-won status, and his privileges.

  There are even larger consequences: a group among the Spacers, for instance, is forcing the introduction of robots on Earth in order to upset the Cities' economy and to create a group of displaced men who eventually will want to emigrate to unsettled planets. That group believes that the fifty Spacer worlds are too stable and have lost their desire to colonize new planets. Earthmen may be able to develop a new, more desirable collaboration of humans and machines that the Spacers call C/Fe (pronounced "see fee"), for carbon and iron which are the basic elements for the two kinds of human and robot existences. But other Spacers oppose the plan and may be able to seize upon Sarton's murder as an excuse to stop the effort.

  Even this conflict does not reach the heart of the appeal of The Caves of Steel for the science-fiction reader. That resides in something more basic that is not even in the human-robot collaboration, reluctant as it is on Baley's part, attractive as it is to the reader in the contrast it presents between Baley's emotionalism and Daneel's unmoved intellectualism (a bit like the later relationship between Star Trek's Jim Kirk and Mr. Spock). The basic concern is the Cities themselves and the people who live in them.

  Dr. Han Fastolfe, spokesman for the Spacers who want to break Earthmen free of the home planet to settle some of the hundred million uninhabited planets in the Galaxy, presents the overriding image of the novel: ". . . Earthmen are all so coddled, so enwombed in their imprisoning caves of steel, that they are caught forever. . . . Civism is ruining Earth."

  The Cities . . . civism . . . these concepts are what The Caves of Steel is about. Asimov alternated exposition about the City and its culture with narrative about the murder investigation, complicating events, and character development. His writing skills had developed to the point that he was able to allow each of these elements to fall naturally and unobtrusively into place. The first extensive discussion of the development of the Cities, for instance, occurs as Baley is riding the expressway toward Spacetown to meet his robot partner for the first time and thinking about the differences between Spacetown and New York, between Spacers and Earthmen.

  Efficiency had been forced on Earth with increasing population. Two billion people, three billion, even five billion could be supported by the planet by progressive lowering of the standard of living. When the population reaches eight billion, however, semistarvation becomes too much like the real thing. . . .

  The radical change had been the gradual formation of the Cities over a thousand years of Earth's history. Efficiency implied bigness. . . .

  Think of the inefficiency of a hundred thousand houses for a hundred thousand families as compared with a hundred-thousand-unit Section; a book-film collection in each house as compared with a Section film concentrate; independent video for each family as compared with video-piping systems.

  For that matter, take the simple folly of endless duplication of kitchens and bathrooms as compared with the thoroughly efficient diners and shower rooms made possible by City culture. . . .

  City culture meant optimum distribution of food, increasing utilization of yeasts and hydroponics. New York City spread over two thousand square miles and at the last census its population was well over twenty million. There were some eight hundred Cities on Earth, average population, ten million.

  Each City became a semiautonomous unit, economically all but self-sufficient. It could roof itself in, gird itself about, burrow itself under. It became a steel cave, a tremendous, self-contained cave of steel and concrete.

  It could lay itself out scientifically. At the center was the enormous complex of administrative offices. In careful orientation to one another and to the whole were the large residential Sections connected and interlaced by the expressway and the localways. Toward the outskirts were the factories, the hydroponic plants, the yeast-culture vats, the power plants. Through all the melee were the water pipes and sewage ducts, schools, prisons and shops, power lines and communication beams.

  There was no doubt about it: the City was the culmination of man's mastery over the environment. Not space travel, not the fifty colonized worlds that were now so haughtily indepe
ndent, but the City. . . .

  The Cities were good.

  The techniques that science-fiction writers had been developing to fictionalize issues, to dramatize future societies in the process of telling the story, were tools that had been invented and perfected and that lay at hand for anyone capable of using them. The Kuttners, Henry and C. L. Moore, had used them well in the early and mid-1940s, Heinlein had mastered them, A. E. van Vogt had adapted them to his own magical purposes, and Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth were beginning to bring them to the purposes of satire. But Asimov, who had participated in their development, displayed his skill in their use particularly well in the robot novels.

  He provided a host of corroborating details, both psychological and social. Codes of behavior have developed naturally around the major institutions of the Cities. The Personals, for instance, centralize bathroom facilities except for the occasional "activated" washbowl, such as Baley has in his "spacious" three-room apartment. So "by strong custom men disregarded one another's presence entirely either within or just outside the Personals," though women used them for social purposes. The "bright cheerfulness'' of the Personals contrasts with the "busy utilitarianism" of the rest of the City. The moving strips of roadway, the expressway and the localways, are places where behavior has become traditional and where juveniles break the traditions and the laws by playing on them such dangerous follow-the-leader games as "running the strips." Ways of behaving in the communal kitchens have become standardized to avoid annoying others and allowing others to annoy you ("the first problem of living is to minimize friction with the crowds that surround you on all sides"). "When you're young, mealtimes are the bright spot of the day," but "there is no one so uncomfortable . . . as the man eating out-of-Section" and "be it ever so humble . . . there's no place like home-kitchen." It might be noted that the novel contains a concern with food and persistent scenes of eating seldom found in Asimov fiction. Baley, for instance, is constantly worried about missing meals, and he is constantly eating, once in company with Daneel. The flavor and texture of the food is specified in significant detail, which, of course, reinforces the obsessional qualities of subsistence living.