Skip to main content

The Caves of Steel (SF) - Isaac Asimov ****

Recently reading In the Blink of an Eye, which features an AI detective, I realised it was time to revisit The Caves of Steel - and I'm glad I did. Despite being 70 years old in 2024, the book is still very readable. The setting is perhaps 3000 years in the future, with the population of Earth largely confined to huge enclosed cities, living a communal life that has been forced on them by resource limitations.

Although robots have been around for thousands of years, they are not widely accepted on Earth, though they are on various other-world colonies. The plot centres on a murder in an enclave outside the city of New York set up for 'spacers' who live a far freer life than the Earth population. A New York detective is partnered with a lifelike spacer robot to try to solve the crime. The detective story itself works well, but two things make the novel particularly interesting: the first is the interaction between detective Elijah Baley and the robot detective R. Daneel Olivaw. The second is how drastically wrong Asimov got the technology.

The Baley/Olivaw relationship - and the wider distrust of robots amongst the Earth population - is of particular interest now that AI is rearing its head as a practical replacement for an increasing number of jobs. While I doubt we would get to the same level of animosity - because robots are more in-your-face than ChatGPT - it's still a thought-provoking comparison.

As for the technology, I know perfectly well that science fiction is not intended to predict the future. But it is still fascinating to see how Asimov, from a 50s perspective, thought that humanoid robots would be fairly easy to build (in I Robot, he has humanoid robots on sale by the end of the twentieth century) but totally failed to see the possibilities of the information revolution. In Caves of Steel, computer memory still involves mercury chambers (something that in reality lasted a handful of years, rather than thousands), film and wire recording are still used, and there is no equivalent of the internet. Where the AI detective in the modern novel can search online data at ultra-high speed, Olivaw has no better search ability than a human, working through documents and microfilm.

As usual with Asimov (something he admitted himself), the biggest flaw here is his inability to write effective female characters. There is only one woman in the book and she is straight from the 50s housewife playbook. But this is the only real let-down here, as the technology misses are more delightful than irritating. Some people even still smoke pipes.

I got this as part of a six-book package of Asimov's robot books - I had all of these once, but they got culled in a move. It was excellent to revisit this title (which I read out of order because of In the Blink of an Eye) and I'm looking forward to the rest.

Paperback:   
Kindle:  

Six book package:   


Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more