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[deckardcanine]

The Asimov novel I mentioned recently finishing is The Robots of Dawn. Ideally, I would have read the two books that come before it in the Robot series, The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, but this was the only one I got as a gift and I didn’t think to remedy the situation before I started. Fortunately, callbacks to previous stories peter out as TRoD goes on, and at least I’d already read I, Robot and Foundation. (TRoD takes place millennia between the two and eventually sets a preliminary stage for the latter.)

Asimov probably started on this story by asking himself, "What if a murder mystery had a robot for a victim, destroyed as only a robot could be?" Of course, that in itself doesn’t spell excitement right away. Despite the victim’s nearly unparalleled resemblance to a human, it’s not legally a murder, and the harshest term you can get people to agree on tentatively is "roboticide." In fact, the only initial suspect is the victim’s creator and rightful owner, which would mean no crime at all. So why should we care what happened? The answer depends on the background, wherein the nearly 400-page story spends less time on robotics than on the implications of human nature.

Only the first chapter takes place on Earth. I’m guessing that either there was an environmental disaster in the distant past or Earthmen grew terribly worried about nuclear war, because the 8 billion of them live chiefly in underground cities and suffer from agoraphobia despite an apparently benign Outside (always capitalized). As a result, for all the technological advances, Earth sounds like essentially one big Third World country. Detective Elijah Baley, the hero of the last two books, has gained interplanetary fame for his achievements, but until he’s called into the above-mentioned case, he spends much of his time helping to get people accustomed to the Outside in the hopes of resuming space colonization to reduce overcrowding.

Alas, since the terraformed worlds have no diseases and their human inhabitants (Spacers) have 300+-year life expectancies, most Spacers have grown to despise Earthmen and possibly respect them even less than they respect robots, leading to uncooperative attitudes on further colonization. How different are their cultures? Well, consider that the first Spacers would be those who wanted to get away from Earth in the first place. They are big on individualism, at least in the sense of having big estates and not sharing much of their work, which hampers them in the tech race. Reputations mean a lot to them, so slander laws are strict. With their relatively small populations, they like to have robots everywhere but the Personal (read: bathroom).

TRoD describes two Spacer worlds in particular. Solaria, the setting for a previous story and birthplace of a major character, is characterized as socially frigid--beyond puritan, you might say. By contrast, Aurora, the main setting of this story (and a partial explanation of the title), has about the same attitude toward sex as Brave New World: It’s as casual as a game of checkers, completely divorced from the reproductive function unless you formally apply for it--which is the only time blood relation matters at all, because only transplanted traditionalists raise their own kids instead of handing them to experts. Neither planet believes in romance.

It is on Aurora that Dr. Han Fastolfe, supposedly the greatest living roboticist, jealously guards the secret to humaniform robots. Others want them to pre-colonize worlds so that the transition of real Spacers will be safer, but Fastolfe distrusts that method and sympathizes too much to marginalize Earthmen for that purpose. When one of his two humaniform units shuts down with no sign of violence, opponents accuse him of trying to make their solution look untenable. If this view catches on, then Earth’s most powerful advocate will lose his clout. Ironically, Fastolfe himself insists that nobody else could have killed his robot, even by accident. He wants Baley to procure compelling evidence that it was just a rare "stroke." But despite his past experience, Baley spends much of his investigation learning how woefully inadequate his education on Auroran laws, customs, and robotics is. Half the time, he’s convinced his task is impossible, but the stakes are too high for him to give up.

A cited critic says that TRoD marks a new high for Asimov’s character development, and I can see that. Everyone, including robots, to appear for more than one subchapter has a distinct persona. No one is entirely relatable, but all are pretty intelligent if a bit twisted. I sense one similarity in my writer geekiness to Asimov: We like to keep the important cast small, especially on a scene-by-scene basis, and focus on talking over action. (I was concerned about that when I started my current NaNoWriMo story.) It’s a little slow and repetitive, perhaps for the benefit of readers who had trouble absorbing enough information on the first go round, but I’ve matured enough not to find it boring.

Within 50 pages, I suspected a solution to the mystery. My mind wandered away from it and returned to it near the end. Turns out I was only vaguely right, and the real solution involves a briefly mentioned premise that I had pushed out of my mind for straining credulity more than the rest. Even so, Asimov handled it pretty ingeniously.

I could never be a mystery writer, and sci-fi is challenging enough as it is. My hat’s off to him for mastering both.

Comments

[nefaria.livejournal.com]

I need to spend some time perusing Asimov's other works. I think the Foundation trilogy and its later sequels are the only novel-sized works of his that I've read.