Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15946 in Books
• Published on: 1993-10-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Customer Reviews

More a curiosity than a must-read
The basic set-up is this: Elijah Baley, first seen in The Caves of Steel, is told by his superiors that he's got to leave Earth and go to Solaria to investigate a murder - an act completely unknown to them and which they're not able to do themselves. He's teamed up with the Robot Daneel (also from The Caves of Steel) and together they try to find the culprit.

Only, as with much of Asimov's work, this isn't so much about investigating the crime, as:

(a) investigating how his Laws of Robotics can be made to fail; and

(b) looking at the problems likely to be faced by future Earth generations.

Compared to his other work however, he is more interested in (b) than in (a). In The Caves of Steel Asimov looked at overcrowding due to overpopulation and how robots could make life easier, in The Naked Sun, he's looking at the flip-side at how robots can change your social outlook to the point of not being able to bear close contact with other humans.

It's an interesting book, more so for looking at the optimism and futurology of the 1950s. However there were things that bothered me - particularly the fact that Baley refers to every robot as "Boy". I think that this is more due to my 21st century sensibilities - when I hear that word used in a command context, I instantly associate it with racism and I don't think that's what Asimov intended. I also found Baley's agrophobia to be too much of a plot device - he can bear the outside and then not bear the outside at strategic moments to push the plot - and when the culprit is uncovered, the rationale for the murder is explained away too quickly and doesn't really seem to make much sense in the context of what we've discovered during the course of the book.

Creative concepts in this space mystery
Asimov was a creative thinker, and a beloved science fiction author. Sad to say, he was not the best writer in the world, having no notion of character development and falling into cliche far too often. Having said that, it's possible to read Asimov's books with great enjoyment if you overlook these faux pas.

"The Naked Sun" is a continuation of "The Caves of Steel", introducing the detective pair Lije Bailey, human, and Daneel Olivaw, robot. In "Caves", the pair team up for the first time to solve the murder of a Spacer, an outworlder living on steel-clad, subterranean Earth. Based on their success, the duo are tapped to solve a murder mystery on Solaria, one of the Spacer planets, along with Aurora, that are the first extra-terrestrial settlements of human beings.

Solaria is a peculiar place. The invention of tri-dimensional television projection (which sounded futuristic when the novel was written but now sounds plausible) was adopted by the Solarians with fervor, so much so, that actual physical contact and presence is considered on par with bathroom subjects. The rich planet, with its lavish estates of orchards, factories or farms, is presided over by a limited number of Solarians who live in splendid isolation, surrounded by fleets of robots to run their enterprises. From status (only a few people and many robots) the Solarians first limited physical contact as a way of showing wealth, then it became a mania, a sort of agoraphobia, where breathing the air that is polluted by another's presence is considered more than a bit distasteful. Solarians are quite social--but all socializing is done via tridimensional projection. Only husbands and wives (and the occasional doctor) are ever tolerated up close.

So, in a world where physical proximity and of course, sexual intercourse a necessary but unpleasant evil (they hadn't considered artificial implantation?) how does a MURDER occur if an individual could not stand to be in the presence of another and all robots are guided by the Three Laws and cannot harm a person? This is the puzzle Lije and Daneel are to solve. It's complicated by the disturbing presence of Gladia, the beautiful widow of the victim. She is the prime suspect, of course, but what was her motive?

Lije is sadly, cloned from the hard-boiled detective cliche like Sergeant Friday of "Dragnet", but less so in "Naked Sun" than "Caves of Steel." Gladia, however, is quite successful as the troubled woman. The plot of this book is intricate, and the novel flies by--a page-turner. Along with "The Gods Themselves", I think this is one of Asimov's best novels.

One more step in Asimov's future history
While this is basically a second science fiction/mystery featuring the team of Earth NYC police detective Elijah Bailey and android R. Daneel Olivaw, the future history thread is taken further as Bailey's determination to spur interest on Earth in colonization on other worlds steadily increases. As he works to deal with his agoraphobia, having never been outside Earth's "caves of steel" previously, this determination becomes ever more obsessive.

The mystery itself borrows from the classic "locked room" mystery genre. This murder could not have happened because the Solarians can't stand being in each other's presence long enough to murder another. However, it did happen and since husbands and wives do need to be in each other's presence for purposes of procreation, the victim's wife is the obvious suspect.

Bailey is hampered in his investigation by three factors: his agoraphobia, the Solarians' aversion to be in another's presence (presence of an Earthman being even worse than the presence of another Solarian since Earthmen are considered disease carriers), and R. Daneel Olivaw's over-protectiveness due to his adherence to the three laws of robots.

All in all, this is indeed a well-crafted mystery as well as science fiction novel, and an excellant early novel in Asimov's future history.