Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition) (23 page)

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Authors: James Gunn

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It could lay itself out scientifically. At the center was the enormous complex of administrative offices. In careful orientation to one another and to the whole were the large residential Sections connected and interlaced by the expressway and the localways. Toward the outskirts were the
factories, the hydroponic plants, the yeast-culture vats, the power plants. Through all the melee were the water pipes and sewage ducts, schools, prisons and shops, power lines and communication beams.
There was no doubt about it: the City was the culmination of man's mastery over the environment. Not space travel, not the fifty colonized worlds that were now so haughtily independent, but the City. . . .
The Cities were good.
The techniques that science-fiction writers had been developing to fictionalize issues, to dramatize future societies in the process of telling the story, were tools that had been invented and perfected and that lay at hand for anyone capable of using them. The Kuttners, Henry and C. L. Moore, had used them well in the early and mid-1940s, Heinlein had mastered them, A. E. van Vogt had adapted them to his own magical purposes, and Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth were beginning to bring them to the purposes of satire. But Asimov, who had participated in their development, displayed his skill in their use particularly well in the robot novels.
He provided a host of corroborating details, both psychological and social. Codes of behavior have developed naturally around the major institutions of the Cities. The Personals, for instance, centralize bathroom facilities except for the occasional "activated" washbowl, such as Baley has in his "spacious" three-room apartment. So "by strong custom men disregarded one another's presence entirely either within or just outside the Personals," though women used them for social purposes. The "bright cheerfulness'' of the Personals contrasts with the "busy utilitarianism" of the rest of the City. The moving strips of roadway, the expressway and the localways, are places where behavior has become traditional and where juveniles break the traditions and the laws by playing on them such dangerous follow-the-leader games as "running the strips." Ways of behaving in the communal kitchens have become standardized to avoid annoying others and allowing others to annoy you ("the first problem of living is to minimize friction with the crowds that surround you on all sides"). "When you're young, mealtimes are the bright spot of the day," but "there is no one so uncomfortable . . . as the man eating out-of-Section" and "be it ever so humble . . . there's no place like home-kitchen." It might be noted that the novel contains a concern with food and persistent scenes of eating seldom found in Asimov fiction. Baley, for instance, is constantly worried about missing meals, and he is constantly eating, once in company with Daneel. The flavor and texture of the food is specified in significant detail, which, of course, reinforces the obsessional qualities of subsistence living.
Civism, the philosophy that supports the way of life created by the Cities, combines two elements: a basic level of security ("the mere fact of living in a modern city insured the bare possibility of existence, even for those entirely declassified") and a life enclosed, crowded, and conducted at levels of existence made bearable only by evolved attitudes of Earthmen, the folkways developed to cope with the problems, and certain small privileges that accompany increasing classification. Enderby, for instance, earns the right to a window in his office (this detail also emphasizes his Medievalism); Baley has earned the activation of his washbowl and the privilege of eating in his home. Although "it was considered the height of ill form to parade `status,' the loss of such small privileges would make life unbearable." Modern civism has minimized the competitive struggle for existence that had been the rule during the "fiscalism" of medieval times, but it has not completely eliminated the struggle for status. All is perceived and to good effect through the filter of Baley's consciousness. Asimov shows us his world or as much of it as his art tells him to show us not in the first person but in the third, through Baley. The reader is with Baley constantly through the novel: Baley's goals, to solve the mystery and to get rid of the threat of the Spacers, are the reader's goals; his perceptions are all the reader gets; and his thoughts (with such exceptions as are acceptable in third-person narration) are shared with the reader. It is Baley who perceives the Cities as good, and it is his changing attitude toward Daneel (and robots in general), the Spacers, and the Cities that the novel really is about.
The Caves of Steel
is that rarity in science fiction, a novel of character. Character is not supposed to concern science-fiction authors very much. Asimov, as a writer who specializes more than most in ideas and rationality, might be expected to care even less. Lije Baley, however, is the key factor in the novel, not merely because he is the detective who must solve the mystery but because of what he is in addition to being a detective.
Unlike other Asimov characters, Baley has a past. His father had been a nuclear physicist with a rating in the top percentile, who was declassified because of an accident in the nuclear plant where he worked. Baley's mother died early, and his father died when Baley was eight. Baley remembers him as sodden, morose, lost, speaking sometimes of the past in hoarse, broken sentences. Baley and his two older sisters went into the Section orphanage. Baley knows the horror of declassification, and that knowledge motivates his desperation to solve the mystery rather than go through what his father suffered. Also
unlike other Asimov characters, who are individuals isolated by job or temperament, Baley has a family: a wife, Jessie, who had enjoyed a small, wicked pride in the name Jezebel until Baley told her that Jezebel was not a painted hussy, and a son, Bentley ("Ben"). Baley also has experiences that keep flooding into his mind: the childhood games of running the strips and hide-and-seek with guide rods (whose gradual warming leads visitors toward their destinations), an uncle who worked in Yeast-town (once Newark, New Brunswick, and Trenton) and gave him illegal yeast treats when he was a child.
The changes that the reader perceives in Baley mirror the changes in the basic theme of urging Earthmen into a relationship with robots (C/Fe) that would make possible the colonization of uninhabited worlds. As the novel begins Baley is vigorously opposed to robots (but not so opposed that his intense feelings of duty and loyalty cannot persuade him to work with a robot). He is gloomy and sardonic as well as a thoughtful man whose fascination with history (like Asimov's) leads him into a variety of historic comparisons and reflections. But his first impulses, to prove that there has been no murder or that if there has, it was committed by a Spacer or by Daneel himself, push him into blind alleys and near disaster. He is not, as he himself reflects, the cool, intellectual detective of fiction; his disturbance at bringing Daneel home makes him forget the murder for a while.
Gradually, Baley begins to change. He listens to Dr. Fastolfe's idealistic plea for the future of humanity. He first rejects the notion of Earthmen going to other worlds and then begins to consider it. He notices the smells of the City for perhaps the first time. He grows used to the presence of Daneel and wonders whether it would be possible to work beside robots to colonize another world. He finds himself echoing Fastolfe's arguments to a Medievalist leader. He begins to confide in Daneel and even to think well of him. "Whatever the creature was," he reflects, "he was strong and faithful, animated by no selfishness. What more could you ask of any friend? Baley needed a friend and he was in no mood to cavil at the fact that a gear replaced a blood vessel in this particular one."
Finally, at the end of the novel, Baley's conversion to Fastolfe's goals is more important than the discovery of the murderer. Enderby is persuaded, on the promise that his crime will not be revealed, to throw his efforts and the strength of the Medievalists behind the attempt to move Earthmen toward extraterrestrial colonization. And Baley finally says to Daneel, "I didn't think I would ever say anything like this to anyone like you, Daneel, but I trust you. I even admire you." And
although Baley considers himself too old to leave Earth (
The Naked Sun
refutes that assumption), he hopes that Daneel might help Ben to do so some day. At the end, suddenly smiling, Baley takes Daneel's elbow, and they walk out the door arm in arm.

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