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

by James Gunn

  Civism, the philosophy that supports the way of life created by the Cities, combines two elements: a basic level of security ("the mere fact of living in a modern city insured the bare possibility of existence, even for those entirely declassified") and a life enclosed, crowded, and conducted at levels of existence made bearable only by evolved attitudes of Earthmen, the folkways developed to cope with the problems, and certain small privileges that accompany increasing classification. Enderby, for instance, earns the right to a window in his office (this detail also emphasizes his Medievalism); Baley has earned the activation of his washbowl and the privilege of eating in his home. Although "it was considered the height of ill form to parade `status,' the loss of such small privileges would make life unbearable." Modern civism has minimized the competitive struggle for existence that had been the rule during the "fiscalism" of medieval times, but it has not completely eliminated the struggle for status. All is perceived and to good effect through the filter of Baley's consciousness. Asimov shows us his world or as much of it as his art tells him to show us not in the first person but in the third, through Baley. The reader is with Baley constantly through the novel: Baley's goals, to solve the mystery and to get rid of the threat of the Spacers, are the reader's goals; his perceptions are all the reader gets; and his thoughts (with such exceptions as are acceptable in third-person narration) are shared with the reader. It is Baley who perceives the Cities as good, and it is his changing attitude toward Daneel (and robots in general), the Spacers, and the Cities that the novel really is about.

  The Caves of Steel is that rarity in science fiction, a novel of character. Character is not supposed to concern science-fiction authors very much. Asimov, as a writer who specializes more than most in ideas and rationality, might be expected to care even less. Lije Baley, however, is the key factor in the novel, not merely because he is the detective who must solve the mystery but because of what he is in addition to being a detective.

  Unlike other Asimov characters, Baley has a past. His father had been a nuclear physicist with a rating in the top percentile, who was declassified because of an accident in the nuclear plant where he worked. Baley's mother died early, and his father died when Baley was eight. Baley remembers him as sodden, morose, lost, speaking sometimes of the past in hoarse, broken sentences. Baley and his two older sisters went into the Section orphanage. Baley knows the horror of declassification, and that knowledge motivates his desperation to solve the mystery rather than go through what his father suffered. Also unlike other Asimov characters, who are individuals isolated by job or temperament, Baley has a family: a wife, Jessie, who had enjoyed a small, wicked pride in the name Jezebel until Baley told her that Jezebel was not a painted hussy, and a son, Bentley ("Ben"). Baley also has experiences that keep flooding into his mind: the childhood games of running the strips and hide-and-seek with guide rods (whose gradual warming leads visitors toward their destinations), an uncle who worked in Yeast-town (once Newark, New Brunswick, and Trenton) and gave him illegal yeast treats when he was a child.

  The changes that the reader perceives in Baley mirror the changes in the basic theme of urging Earthmen into a relationship with robots (C/Fe) that would make possible the colonization of uninhabited worlds. As the novel begins Baley is vigorously opposed to robots (but not so opposed that his intense feelings of duty and loyalty cannot persuade him to work with a robot). He is gloomy and sardonic as well as a thoughtful man whose fascination with history (like Asimov's) leads him into a variety of historic comparisons and reflections. But his first impulses, to prove that there has been no murder or that if there has, it was committed by a Spacer or by Daneel himself, push him into blind alleys and near disaster. He is not, as he himself reflects, the cool, intellectual detective of fiction; his disturbance at bringing Daneel home makes him forget the murder for a while.

  Gradually, Baley begins to change. He listens to Dr. Fastolfe's idealistic plea for the future of humanity. He first rejects the notion of Earthmen going to other worlds and then begins to consider it. He notices the smells of the City for perhaps the first time. He grows used to the presence of Daneel and wonders whether it would be possible to work beside robots to colonize another world. He finds himself echoing Fastolfe's arguments to a Medievalist leader. He begins to confide in Daneel and even to think well of him. "Whatever the creature was," he reflects, "he was strong and faithful, animated by no selfishness. What more could you ask of any friend? Baley needed a friend and he was in no mood to cavil at the fact that a gear replaced a blood vessel in this particular one."

  Finally, at the end of the novel, Baley's conversion to Fastolfe's goals is more important than the discovery of the murderer. Enderby is persuaded, on the promise that his crime will not be revealed, to throw his efforts and the strength of the Medievalists behind the attempt to move Earthmen toward extraterrestrial colonization. And Baley finally says to Daneel, "I didn't think I would ever say anything like this to anyone like you, Daneel, but I trust you. I even admire you." And although Baley considers himself too old to leave Earth (The Naked Sun refutes that assumption), he hopes that Daneel might help Ben to do so some day. At the end, suddenly smiling, Baley takes Daneel's elbow, and they walk out the door arm in arm.

  That final image, more than anything else, speaks to Asimov's own perception of the novel's heart. And, as if to reinforce image with motivation, Daneel has already revealed that the whole Spacer concern had been to try to persuade at least a segment of Earth's population that Sarton's and Fastolfe's goals were their own. Daneel's work with Baley had been an experiment not in whether robots can solve crimes but in whether Earthmen can be persuaded to accept robots and the goal of extraterrestrial emigration. The Spacers conclude that their only hope is the romantics, and the romantics are all Medievalists, actual or potential.

  The other characters are drawn with greater care than is customary in science-fiction novels: Enderby, first as the harried Commissioner with his Medievalist affections and then reinterpreted as a Medievalist leader who has been trapped by accident into the role of murderer; Jessie, whose loss of name pushes her into a harmless but misleading flirtation with the Medievalists; and Daneel himself, the polite, deferential, and literal-minded robot detective, with the built-in sense of justice, who provides the ideal foil for Baley's emotionalism, and is, no doubt, the author's reason for making Baley emotional.

  Daneel allowed Asimov to reexplore the problems of robots that he had covered so thoroughly in I, Robot: the First Law, for instance, which eliminates robots as suspects, and the literalness of robot minds, such as Asimov dealt with two years later in "Risk." Baley is suspicious of Daneel's statement that a final adjustment of his circuits impressed into his motivation banks a particularly strong drive, a desire for justice. Justice, Baley says, is an abstraction; only a human being can understand it. But Daneel defines justice in pragmatic terms as the condition that exists when all the laws are enforced.

  Asimov reversed the situation of "Evidence" when Baley accuses Daneel of being human, but it is not as difficult for a robot to prove that he is not human as vice versa. Like Byerley, however, Daneel can eat; he reveals a food sac from which he must later remove the food. Daneel is asked not to forget something, and he comments that robots are not capable of forgetting. Daneel's humanoid appearance and demeanor make even more effective the scene in which he is slapped by the Medievalist Clousarr. Daneel responds, "That was a dangerous action, Francis. Had I not moved backward you might easily have damaged your hand. As it is, I regret that I must have caused you pain."

  Baley refers to Daneel's "queer mixture of ability and submissiveness" at one point. At another, he thinks bitterly about the ambiguities of the First Law: "A robot must not hurt a human being, unless he can think of a way to prove it is for the human being's ultimate good after all." [This sarcastic remark re-emerges as the "Zeroth Law" in The Robots of Dawn and Foundation and Earth.] Asimov also has the opportunity to cast a backward glance at Campbell'
s 1934 story, "Twilight": "He [Baley] had known well enough . . . the qualities that marked off a man from a machine. Curiosity had to be one of them. A six-week-old kitten was curious, but how could there be a curious machine, be it ever so humanoid?''

  Asimov also rationalizes the humanoid shape for robots, which he did not do in I, Robot. Dr. Gerrigel points out that "the human form is the most successful generalized form in all nature." Therefore, rather than buying "a tractor with a positronic brain, a reaper, a harrow, a milker, an automobile, and so on," it makes more sense to buy "ordinary unbrained machinery with a single positronic robot to run them all" at "a fiftieth or a hundredth the expense."

  Asimov supports his vision of the future with a sprinkling of technical details other than those that describe robots or the Cities or the express-ways. His Cities are powered by atomic energy (he uses the older term, "atomic pile") and were made possible by force shields, which lessened the threat of atomic war. Asimov foresaw the problem of the disposal of radioactive wastes and had the "so-called `hot ash' . . . forced by air pressure through leaden pipes to distant caverns ten miles out in the ocean and a half mile below the ocean floor." But "Baley sometimes wondered what would happen when the caverns were filled." The force shield also is present in the form of a force barrier that separates Spacetown from New York City.

  There are other details: subetheric hand disruptors, somno vapor and retch gas (prophetic!) that help police control crowds, blasters (presumably different from subetheric hand disruptors), keratofiber (made out of some kind of horn?), one-way glass transparency at the flick of a switch, trimension that projects images in three dimensions, focused duo-beam for spying, hyposlivers of medication that dissolve into the body, shielded subether communications, no-stick fluorocarbon coatings on cookware, motospirals (a kind of escalator), natural solariums at the top of buildings so the rich can enjoy the sun when they wish, spray-on cosmetics, wire film (a kind of videotape) and a microfilm projector for projection in three dimensions with a film record in the form of a fixed atomic pattern in an aluminum block, and an alphasprayer. These are not predictions in the way that Hugo Gernsback's Ralph 124C41 + was largely a compilation of predictions. They function to reinforce the narrative.

  The expressways, for instance, not only provide the flavor of a distant and more efficient future and serve as the means to deal with mass transportation; they also are used later in the story for the escape of Baley and Daneel from the Medievalists. The guide sticks, which lead Baley and Daneel to the laboratory of Clousarr, the Medievalist "zymologist" (yeast expert), later become part of the explanation for the "murder" of Sammy, when Baley speculates that Enderby mis-set the guide stick for Dr. Gerrigel so that the robotocist would discover Sammy's dead body. Similarly, the escape from the Medievalists that takes Baley and Daneel to the atomic power plant provides the opportunity to reveal that gamma radiation can destroy the delicate balance of Daneel's positronic brain and gave Enderby the idea not only of stealing the alpha-sprayer that he ordered Sammy to clap to his head but of framing Baley for the crime.

  Some of these details are less persuasive than others, to be sure. Their importance is the way they are worked into the fabric of the novel. They became part of the perfected Asimov style, in a way mainstream critics seldom use the term, or have to. A science-fiction writer must create a convincing milieu for events.

  Asimov developed his style gradually. Campbell helped him, no doubt, by suggesting the value of reinforcing details. Asimov also learned from reading other writers, such as Clifford Simak, and from participation in several Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences. By The Caves of Steel, Asimov's style had settled into simple words (except for an occasional technical term) arranged in short sentences, and those sentences arranged in short paragraphs, sometimes only a sentence or two long.

  In The Caves of Steel, though Asimov's style is limited by the matter-of-fact perceptions of his viewpoint character, his writing does rise to eloquence (usually in his descriptions of the City and its ways) and to sensitive depictions of human nature, as in the following paragraphs, reminiscent of Proust in their observations:

  Every time he [Baley] smelled raw yeast, the alchemy of sense perception threw him more than three decades into the past. He was a ten-year-old again, visiting his Uncle Boris, who was a yeast farmer. Uncle Boris always had a little supply of yeast delectables: small cookies, chocolaty things filled with sweet liquid, hard confections in the shape of cats and dogs. Young as he was, he knew that Uncle Boris shouldn't really have had them to give away and he always ate them quietly, sitting in a corner with his back to the center of the room. He would eat them quickly for fear of being caught.

  They tasted all the better for that.

  There is, in addition, a sense of setting in The Caves of Steel (and in The Naked Sun) that does not exist in The Foundation Trilogy and the robot stories, and for good reason. The Caves of Steel is not only a title but a place, a place that is important to the murder investigation, the psychology of the City's citizens, and the theme of the Spacers trying to induce them to leave its protection. Everywhere Baley goes he is conscious of his surroundings: Enderby's office, the expressway, the Personals, his apartment (contrasted later on with a "grim, lowerclass apartment"), Spacetown, the motorways, a kitchen, a power plant, and Yeast-town. The presence of an outsider, Daneel, brings everything freshly to Baley's awareness. Setting is as necessary to The Caves of Steel as it is unnecessary in The Foundation Trilogy.

  The Caves of Steel contains other stylistic elements peculiar to science fiction that the mainstream reader might not recognize. Samuel R. Delany commented in a 1979 Modern Language Association meeting that the problem with non-science-fiction readers and critics is that they must be taught to read science fiction sentence by sentence and word by word. In science fiction, he says, the metaphorical may become literal, language has implications that must be understood before the reader is aware of what is going on, and often judgment must be suspended until further information clarifies the situation.

  In some senses these elements are part of The Caves of Steel. Although Asimov's style, as always, is simple and straightforward, he allows himself the occasional telling metaphor that illuminates the environment and times of the novel. "Medieval," for instance, is that kind of metaphor: it stands for us, our times, our ways. Windows are Medieval. Eyeglasses are Medieval. The (King James) Bible is Medieval, and it is written in Middle English. The reader is intended to understand not only the passage of three thousand years but the false perspective that lumps centuries and millennia together in categories that are too broad for accuracy.

  The Commissioner calls Baley "a modernist" and goes on to describe a romanticized and false version of life before the Cities:

  In Medieval times, people lived in the open. I don't mean on the farms only. I mean in the cities, too. Even in New York. When it rained, they didn't think of it as waste. They gloried in it. They lived close to nature.

  It's healthier, better. The troubles of modern life come from being divorced from nature. Read up on the Coal Century sometime.

  In these references, of course, Asimov is referring, as well, to our own attitudes toward the past, as Poe was in "Mellonta Tauta."

  In The Caves of Steel, as in well-written science fiction of all kinds, language must constantly be inspected for surprises and reinterpretation. Baley notes, for instance, that there are no expressway directions to Spacetown. He explains why almost immediately: "if you've business there, you know the way" and "if you don't know the way, you've no business there." In a related logical process, the novel raises an aspect of Spacer attitudes that infuriates Earthmen. Earthmen are not allowed into Spacetown except singly and then only when thoroughly cleansed and decontaminated as if they were dirty and diseased. Later this business is turned around and inspected from the other side. Earthmen haven't changed, but Spacers have; like Wells's Martians, they have eliminated infectious diseases and contact with Earthmen might be fatal.r />