by James Gunn
I'm enclosed. This plane is just a little City.
But he didn't fool himself. There was an inch of steel at his left; he could feel it with his elbow. Past that, nothing
Well, air! But that was nothing, really.
A thousand miles of it in one direction. A thousand in another. One mile of it, maybe two, straight down.
He almost wished he could see straight down, glimpse the top of the buried Cities he was passing over; New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington. He imagined the rolling, low-slung cluster complexes of domes he had never seen but knew to be there. And under them, for a mile underground and dozens of miles in every direction, would be the Cities.
The endless, living corridors of the Cities, he thought, alive with people; apartments, community kitchens, factories, Expressways, all comfortable and warm with the evidence of man.
From Washington, Baley goes to a spaceship and experiences an Earth night ("Baley shivered spasmodically in the raw, open air"), but it is not so bad because "the night closed in . . . like dark black walls melting into a black ceiling overhead." Then he must travel by Spacer vessel, by Jump through hyperspace, to Solaria. That is not so bad either because the spaceship is all enclosed like a small city and even larger than an airplane. The first crisis comes when the spaceship is scheduled to land on Solaria, and Baley is told it will land in daylight. He will "have to step out onto the unprotected surface of a planet in daytime." He is fighting panic again as the first chapter ends.
Baley tries to tell himself that being in the open is natural; men had done it all their lives, and the Spacers did it now. "There is no real harm in wall-lessness." But reason alone is not enough. "Something above and beyond reason cried out for walls and would have none of space." Daneel, however, anticipates Baley's neurosis and arranges for an airtube, commonly used in space between vessels, to be connected to a ground-transport vehicle. Daneel speaks of Baley's "peculiarities," a term Baley doesn't like. He resents Daneel's concern about his neurosis and feels "a sudden need to see," motivated partly by Daneel's oversolicitude and partly by Minnim's instructions to observe. But Daneel will not retract the top of the vehicle for fear of the harm that Baley might suffer. Baley has to trick the robot driver into opening the top and exposing him to Solaria's naked sun: "Blue, green, air, noise, motion and over it all, beating down, furiously, relentlessly, frighteningly, was the white light that came from a ball in the sky.'' Daneel has to pull Baley down to keep him from injuring his eyes by staring too long at the sun, and Baley loses consciousness.
Asimov made Baley's neurosis convincingly crippling today it is called "panic disorder" and treated with drugs such as Prozac or therapy much like Baley's own exposure of himself to what he fears the most but also presents Baley as a man with a stubborn need to face his fear and conquer it.
What he really wanted was an inner knowledge that he could take care of himself and fulfill his assignment. The sight and fear of the open had been hard to take. It might be that when the time came he would lack the hardihood to dare face it again at the cost of his self-respect and, conceivably, of Earth's safety. All over a small matter of emptiness.
His face grew grim even at the glancing touch of that thought. He would face air, sun, and empty space yet!
When Baley tries to sleep, however, he pictures the house that has been built for him and Daneel (and will be torn down when he leaves because only one house is allowed per estate and labor is cheap), "balanced precariously at the outer skin of the world, with emptiness waiting just outside like a monster." And he thinks of Jessie, a thousand light-years away, and he wishes there were a tunnel from Solaria to Earth so he could walk back to Earth, back to Jessie, back to comfort and security.
Baley and the reader are continually reminded of Baley's insecurity and his determination to resist it. He reflects that the topmost levels in New York are low-rent (this seems inconsistent with his description in The Caves of Steel of the solariums of the wealthy). His dream of Jessie includes a sun shining down on them through the caves of steel. Daneel continues his efforts to protect Baley from his own weaknesses, trying to persuade him on several occasions to stay within the house prepared for them and to do his interviewing by trimensional projection.
Baley finds himself in an airborne vessel for a second time on his way to see the sociologist Anselmo Quemot, but this vessel has windows and the windows are transparent. Baley fights his distress, which Asimov reveals through understatement: "he buried his head in his knees only when he could absolutely no longer help it." But, a bit earlier, Baley "had begun by stepping across open ground to the waiting plane with a kind of lightheaded dizziness that was almost enjoyable, and he had ordered the windows left unblanked in a kind of manic self-confidence." Baley's will begins to master his fears. In the interview with Quemot, opposing fears are neatly balanced as Baley's initial concern about blanking out the windows is matched by Quemot's growing neurosis about Baley's physical presence.
In the next scene, Baley goes to see Delmarre's assistant, Klorissa Cantoro. He scarcely minds the plane trip this time, but he expresses a desire to get indoors quickly again this is contrasted with Klorissa's concern that he come no closer to her than some twenty-five feet. But Baley asks to go outside again ("I'm trying to grow accustomed to the outdoors") in order to observe the children at play. He has a physical reaction to the outdoors his body feels chilled, his teeth chatter, his eyes hurt from looking "so far at a horizon so hazy green and blue" "and yet he could fight off the urge to run, to return to enclosure." He marvels at ''a living tree!" A bit later he walks under a group of three trees and finds it "almost like being surrounded by imperfect walls. The sun was only a wavering series of glitters through the leaves, so disconnected as almost to be robbed of horror." But when Klorissa calls to him "watch out!" his taut emotions "snapped wide and he flamed into panic. All the terror of the open air and the endless vaults of heaven broke in upon him."
On his way to an interview with Gladia, "for the first time Baley found himself not minding a plane flight through open space. . . . It was almost as though he were in his own element. . . . How fast could a man adapt to nightmare? Or was it Gladia? He would be seeing her soon, not viewing her. Was that what gave him confidence and this odd feeling of mixed apprehension and anticipation?"
During the interview, the image of walls reappears in a light-form portrait Gladia does of him. She encloses it all in "a flat, lusterless hollow cube of slate gray . . ." and "the light within shone through it, but dimmer; imprisoned, somehow." She identifies it as "the wall about you, the way you can't go outside, the way you have to be inside. You are inside there. Don't you see?" Baley's disapproval of the image leads him to agree to walk outside with Gladia, hoping that if he goes in spite of his impulse to refuse she will agree "to take away the gray." But as they leave, the structure of light "stayed behind, holding Baley's imprisoned soul fast in the gray of the Cities.''
The walk is the ultimate trial not only for Gladia, who enjoys "seeing" and proximity to a man in spite of her upbringing, but for Baley. He finds that space draws him, but he wants "Earth and the warmth and companionship of the man-crammed Cities." But he no longer can summon up an image of New York to sustain him. The time is late afternoon, and Baley faces the movement of the sun. Finally, he finds himself staring directly at the sun as it rests nearly at the horizon, and he has a vision.
The sun was moving down to the horizon because the planet's surface was moving away from it, a thousand miles an hour, spinning under that naked sun, spinning with nothing to guard the microbes called men that scurried over its spinning surface, spinning madly forever, spinning spinning. . . .
The experience overcomes him; he faints again, from what Daneel later calls the cumulative effects of being exposed to the open.
Baley's successful fight against his neurosis comes to a resolution when, still weak from his sunset experience, he walks to the window and starts to lift the curtain. Daneel takes it out
of his fingers. "In the split fraction of a moment in which Baley watched the robot's hand take the curtain away from him with the loving caution of a mother protecting her child from the fire, a revolution took place within him." Just as Delmarre's nursery robots cannot match long-term good against the short-term discipline of their charges, so Daneel cannot understand Baley's need to face his terror.
He [Baley] snatched the curtain back, yanking it out of Daneel's grasp. Throwing his full weight against it he tore it away from the window, leaving shreds behind.
"Partner Elijah!" said Daneel softly. "Surely you know now what the open will do to you."
"I know," said Baley, "what it will do for me." . . .
And for the first time he faced it freely. It was no longer bravado, or perverse curiosity, or the pathway to a solution of a murder. He faced it because he knew he wanted to and because he needed to. That made all the difference.
Walls were crutches! Darkness and crowds were crutches! He must have thought so, unconsciously, and hated them even when he most thought he loved and needed them. . . .
He felt himself filling with a sense of victory, and as though victory were contagious a new thought came, bursting like an inner shout. . . .
That thought is the solution to the murder. One good thing leads to another. Asimov has shown Baley passing through successive stages of his agoraphobia and the consequences of his attempts to conquer it, growing more able to control his fear with each incident, until at last he masters his deepest apprehensions and becomes a better person at the same time that he solves the murder that brought him to Solaria.
Only Baley's return to Earth remains to bring the movement of the novel full circle. The theme of The Caves of Steel was the need for Earthmen to emigrate to the unsettled planets, as a means not so much of relieving population pressure (an impractical notion, as Asimov exposed in Nemesis) but of resuming humanity's march to the stars so that it can accept its heritage: the uninhabited Galaxy. The theme did not seem to be taken particularly seriously in the first novel, for the possibility of Earthmen going to other planets without their enclosed environment seemed so unlikely as to be virtually impossible: at best it might be left to their children or their children's children. But in The Naked Sun Baley faced his fears for all Earthmen; what he can do, others can do. Baley thinks of his son Bentley "standing on some empty world, building a spacious life. It was a frightening thought. Baley still feared the open. [Asimov was a realist about human psychology and did not believe that he could work a miracle and change Baley completely.] But he no longer feared the fear! It was not something to run from, that fear, but something to fight."
Baley goes through a few paragraphs of reverie, retracing his experiences with the open spaces and the naked sun on Solaria, and realizes not only that others can do it but that it has changed him. He no longer fits in on Earth. "He had told Minnim that Cities were wombs, and so they were. And what was the first thing a man must do before he can be a man? He must be born. He must leave the womb. And once left, it could not be re-entered." For Baley the caves of steel now are alien.
The novel ends as it began, with Baley facing his fear. But now he can handle it. He also has been changed by his experience and he understands his dream on Solaria. The last words of the novel are:
He lifted his head and he could see through all the steel and concrete and humanity above him. He could see the beacon set in space to lure men outward. He could see it shining down. The naked sun!
The Naked Sun was the last science-fiction novel Asimov would write until The Gods Themselves fifteen years later (aside from a couple of his juvenile novels and his novelization of the film Fantastic Voyage). Why not a third robot novel to make the series a trilogy? After all, the trilogy seems like the natural science-fiction series unless the series continues interminably. In the second decade of the century there were the George Allan England Darkness and Dawn trilogy, the Charles B. Stilson Polaris trilogy, and J. U. Giesy's "Dog Star" trilogy; more recently have come J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-55), Harry Harrison's East of Eden trilogy, Brian W. Aldiss's Helliconia trilogy, and so many fantasy trilogies that one loses track. And, of course, The Foundation Trilogy. Asimov answered the question himself in The Rest of the Robots, which in the Doubleday edition included the robot novels.
While I was writing The Naked Sun, it became perfectly clear to me that what I was working on was the second novel of a trilogy.
In The Caves of Steel I had a society heavily overweighted in favor of humanity, with the robots unwelcome intruders. In The Naked Sun, on the other hand I had an almost pure robot society with only a thin leaven of humanity barely holding it together.
What I needed to do next was to form the perfect topper to my vision of the future by setting the third novel of the trilogy in Aurora, and depicting the complete fusion of man and robot into a society that was more than both and better than either.
In the summer of 1958 I even started the novel, and then somewhere in the fourth chapter, between one page and the next, something happened.
What had happened was Sputnik. By the summer of 1958 Asimov had decided that "the American public deserved understanding of science and that it was the burning duty of writing scientists to try to give them that understanding." He turned to the subsequent science popularizations that brought him fame and fortune and that make up the majority of his 470 books.
The explanation of the decision is neat and no doubt true as far as it went. But there were other reasons. Asimov may have reached the limits of his accomplishments in science fiction. He mentioned this in his autobiography:
As to my other career, science fiction, there, too, I had gone as far as I could. I might do things that were better than "Nightfall," The Foundation Trilogy, I, Robot, or The Caves of Steel, but surely not much better. These were already recognized as classics, and I had been writing for fifteen years and I had yet to make more than ten or eleven thousand dollars a year as a writer.
Moreover, the third novel in the prospective trilogy was not going well. Asimov would not abandon what he considered to be his best writing in the midst of what he considered his best novels and never return. A third factor in his decision may have been that the first two novels led to a third only if one considers them to be about C/Fe, the blend of humanity and robots into a better-working culture. Even from that perspective, a novel placed on Aurora would have been the most difficult to bring off successfully, and out of keeping with the utopian forms of the two earlier novels. And C/Fe is only a small part of what The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun are about. More engrossing and more vital are Earth and Solaria as cultural mirror images; in this sense a third novel would seem at best only a middle ground and at worst unnecessary.
Finally, if one reads the novels as being about Baley's education as examples of the type of plot Heinlein has called "the man-who-learned-better" then that education had been completed. Anything more was simply elaboration. Unlike The Foundation Trilogy, which seemed to cry out for a fourth volume, The Robot Novels were complete with two.
In addition to their own value as the finest expressions of Asimov's art, The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun stand as touchstones for the way in which they exemplify a basic difference (perhaps the basic difference) between science fiction and mainstream fiction the concept of human adaptability. The influence of Darwin's 1859 Origin of Species has been recognized by many scholars; evolution and natural selection not only shaped H. G. Wells, who, in turn, shaped science fiction; the theory of evolution, whether accepted or rejected, changed forever the way people thought about their place in the universe. In adopting evolution, along with all other scientific concepts of the way things work, however, science-fiction writers also adopted a view of humanity that mainstream fiction rejected: humans, like the rest of the natural world, are not fixed in form or function; people, like whales and elephants, bacteria and viruses, are mutable, not only selected by but shaped by their environmen
ts. The human environment, however, increasingly is social, and the fabric of society is woven by science and technology.
The reader can see adaptability of humanity as the unstated premise of The Robot Novels. Earthmen, long accustomed to living in their caves of steel, have accepted it as the natural way of life and their agoraphobia as a normal condition. The Solarians, on the other hand, have become so accustomed to their limited numbers and vast estates that they consider their agoraphilia the ideal state of humanity.
To the Darwinian theorem of human adaptability, SF writers added an important corollary: rational choice. Unlike the other species, humans can understand the evolutionary process and their own adaptations to new conditions, and choose to behave in other ways than those for which they have been conditioned. Baley, for instance, must confront and conquer his neuroses in order, first, to solve Sarton's murder, second, Delmarre's murder, and third, the problem of Earthmen becoming spacemen, as well as the proper relationship between humans and machines, C/Fe.