Influences of different mystery fiction periods and sub-genres on The Caves of Steel and the other two works in Asimov’s science and mystery fiction mash-up trilogy.
If you haven’t read The Caves of Steel yet, beware. Even though I tried to avoid it, this article may contain spoilers.
An edition of The Caves of Steel was published by Bantam Spectra Books in 1991. In its introduction, called The Story Behind The Robot Novels, Isaac Asimov talks about the conversation that inspired his first ever science and mystery fiction mash-up. In the spring of 1952, Horace Gold—then editor of Galaxy—and Isaac Asimov were discussing a possible new novel. Gold suggested, “You like mysteries. Put a murder in [an overpopulated world in which robots are taking over human jobs] and have a detective solve it with a robot partner. If the detective doesn’t solve it, the robot will replace him,” (14). How about that for a writing prompt?
In Asimov’s words, “That struck fire… The result was The Caves of Steel… a true science fiction story, [and] classic mystery novel that doesn’t cheat the reader,” (14). Not cheating the reader is one of the cardinal rules from the Golden Age of mystery writing that he closely followed. True to the most classic of detective novels, the solution is revealed by Plain-clothes Man Elijah Baley through rational analysis of the facts. By doing so, Asimov instills a sense of “Fair Play” in his first science and mystery fiction mash-up comparable to works from the 1920s and 30s.
He wrote The Caves of Steel in 1954 though. By then, some of the more rigid rules for a mystery novel had been laxed and the idea of a detective without personal life, emotional struggles, and romantic interests had been successfully challenged by many mystery writers, famously by Dorothy L. Sayers in Gaudy Night (1935). In this Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novel, there is no murder (against Van Dine’s rule number 7), and the climax of the novel comes after the solution of the crime, when Harriet Vane accepts Lord Peter Wimsey’s marriage proposal. Only six years earlier, in 1929, in her introduction to the Omnibus of Crime, Dorothy L. Sayers had stated bluntly, “The less love in a detective-story, the better.” By 1954, when Elijah Baley’s wife gets entangled in the investigation in a most contentious way, it’s all within the expectation that a detective in a mystery novel mustn’t be a “puppet” going about the motions of solving a puzzle.
The main character being a Plain-clothes Man, a detective in a structured police department, makes The Caves of Steel an example of the police procedurals that got traction after WWII. Back in the 1920s and 30s, police detectives were regarded with distrust. It’s no coincidence that detectives in classic mysteries like Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Miss Marple are private practitioners that run laps around their police counterparts. The public’s attitude toward organized police departments markedly changed after the United States’ victory in World War II when the triumph of modern bureaucratic and technological military “communicated a notion that security could come from organized, technically skilled collective effort” (Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, 1980, 169).
Readers of modern police procedurals may be disappointed by the lack of forensic science in Asimov’s work, but DNA samples and a parade of expert technicians only became prominent in the 1980s. In that regard, The Caves of Steel reads more like a classic. A buddy cop classic mystery with suspect interviews and a series of red herrings that must be overcome. Not disappointingly, the main character goes against the rules during the investigation—convincing R. Daneel Olivaw, his robot partner, to do it with him. At times during the investigation, the partners suspect each other, and in the end there’s a satisfying confrontation with the perpetrator.
The Caves of Steel follows Plain-clothes Man Elijah Baley’s investigation into the murder of roboticist and spacer ambassador Roj Nemennuh Sarton.
Three thousand years in the future, hyperspace travel has been developed and fifty “Spacer worlds” have been colonized by humans who rely heavily on robots for their existence. With eight-billion people—three times the 1950s’s numbers—Earth is overcrowded. Humans live inside metal domes capable of sustaining tens of millions of lives under strict conditions that Elijah wonders about during his train journey to the scene of the murder in spacetown: “take the simple folly of endless duplication of kitchens and bathrooms as compared with the thoroughly efficient diners [called section kitchens] and shower rooms [called Personals] made possible by city culture” (31). Not a sequence of action scenes, the book has long descriptive segments where we learn how most Earth men see the world around them through Elijah’s musings.
To appease the spacers, Elijah must solve the murder in partnership with R. Daneel Olivaw, an advanced robot identical to the victim and capable of detecting human emotions by scanning their encephalographic waves.
The murder investigation explores the crossing of three distinctive philosophies of life described in the book:
Spacers believe that only by cooperating with advanced AI can humanity continue to grow. They return and establish spacertowns in hopes of convincing Earth humans to further space exploration in partnership with humanoids like R. Daneel. Because of their extreme longevity and negative population growth and renovation, spacer culture grew stagnant. Furthermore, spacers’ immunology grew weaker in overprotected terraformed planets with environments sanitized by design. To advance their expansionist vision, they need to cooperate with sturdier Earth humans.
Satisfied city duelers, like Elijah, suffer from agoraphobia and are contented with things as they are to the point of having protested, albeit unsuccessfully, the establishment of spacertowns with their expansive open areas and houses and robot-ridden societies. Already losing their jobs to less sophisticated robots and prejudiced against spacers and their extreme hygienic demands, Earth men prefer to maintain their distance. The fact that spacers don’t have the sophisticated autoimmune system of Earth men anymore isn’t common knowledge. Spacers justifiably feel that such information would weaken their position on Earth.
Medievalists nurse a nostalgic vision of the past, wish to expand outside the domes, and are extremely anti-robot. One of their leaders, upon seeing R. Daneel Olivaw, decides the humanoid must be eliminated and programs a robot to execute the plan. Nonetheless, R. Daneel is the spitting image of his creator, ambassador Roj Nemennuh Sarton, so the ambassador is killed instead.
Despite navigating a complex metropolis to solve the murder, the very human motivations of ambition, prejudice, and fear and the enclosed setting of a dome create a sense of a cozy mystery at times. All suspects are always close at hand, and their behavior, more than anything else, helps Elijah solve the mystery. On the other hand, Elijah’s ever-present inner voice, together with his exchanges with R. Daneel, highlight the buddy cop character of the novel.
The focus on close communities and raw human emotions permeates the other two science and mystery fiction mash-ups from Isaac Asimov.
In The Naked Sun, an entire spacer planet replaces the country village of the classic mystery, but it maintains its limited and cozy number of suspects. A clash with local leaders over cultural perceptions and practices characterizes the typical struggle with authority of a police procedural novel, as well as suspect interviews and misinformation. In the end, the puzzle is solved through intellectual analysis of the case. Classic to the core.
I’ll discuss The Robots of Dawn in another post to explore how Asimov’s work changed in subtle, but distinctive ways. Published in 1983—twenty-six years after The Naked Sun—Asimov’s work follows the evolution of the mystery genre and becomes representative of the eighties.
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