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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.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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