Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1324978 in Books
• Published on: 1991-12-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 288 pages

Synopsis
The Earth will be destroyed by Solaria's robot army if Elijah Baley fails to find the murderer of an eminent scientist.

Customer Reviews

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.

Elijah Bayley and R. Daneel Olivaw team up again.
This is the second of Asimovs' Elijah Bayley and R. Daneel Olivaw detective trilogy. They met in 'Caves of Steel' which are the overcrowded permanantly covered cities of Earth. In 'Naked Sun' earth detective Elijah is plucked from his home world and transported to Solaria a world with 10,000 robots to each human to team up again with human like robot R. Daneel Olivaw to solve a murder case with galactic consequences. In doing so he has to fight his agrophobia and be out in the 'Naked Sun' for the first time in his life. To Solarians Earthmen are disease ridden, short lived and take the disgusting habit of actually being in the presence of other humans for granted. On Solaria inhabitants never actually 'see' each other in person only 'view' each other over holographic links. Meetings between husband and wife are exclusively for procreation and not spoken of in polite society. So who could have visciously smashed the skull of a prominent 'good' Solarian roboticist leaving an unknown robot with a permanantly frozen brain and where was the murder weapon? As the story unfolds Elijah forms an increasingly dependant bond with his robot partner and a strange relationship with the murdered mans young widow Gladia. Asimovs talent for story telling and weaving mystery into a well crafted plot is well displayed in this book. The people who live such strange lives are so believable. Bayleys intuitive blundering and Daneels constant logicality and desire to protect the Earthman suck the reader in to a world so far removed from our own in space and time and yet we understand and symperthize. If you read and enjoyed 'Caves of Steel' you will enjoy 'Naked Sun' and at the end you'll be hooked and need to read its sequel 'Robots of Dawn'.