Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition) (27 page)

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Authors: James Gunn

BOOK: Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition)
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Asimov's greatest delight, here at least, is in the social customs that have developed to reinforce the physical situation on Solaria. The language reflects the Solarians' personal contact taboo: terms relating to personal contact (affection, love, children, even touching) are obscene or scandalous, and films of people kissing are pornographic. Liberties may be taken while viewing; nudity is not uncommon, and the beautiful Gladia first appears to Baley like Venus fresh from her bath. Daneel, incidentally, interprets her action, perhaps correctly, as a ploy to gain Baley's sympathy, though Klorissa is equally ready to bare herself before the trimensional camera. Gladia excuses it as "only viewing." On the rare occasions when individuals meet, however, they are fully clothed down to gloves and stand far from each other.
This leads to one of the key scenes in the novel. Early in 1956 Asimov wrote to me that he had just written a pornographic scene that the postmaster could not touch. (This, of course, was 40 years ago when the postmaster was still declaring books obscene.) He was right. After Leebig commits suicide and just before Gladia is about to depart for Aurora, where she can lead a more "normal" life and her more affectionate nature can be expressed, she asks for one last interview with Baley and arrives in person, fully clothed, of course. As they are saying goodbye, she asks if she can touch him. Slowly, she removes her glove. Asimov has invested the act with such significance that it is more erotic than explicit sex.
The emotional content of the scene is heightened by the possibility of romance between Baley and Gladia. It is no more than a possibility. Baley is approaching middle age and is a man of honor. The two recognize the gulf between their cultures but they also recognize their mutual attraction. When Baley dreams about his wife, Jessie, she looks a lot like Gladia. He and Gladia have a meeting at which Gladia overcomes her Solarian neurosis to allow Baley to get closer and closer, even to sit on the same garden bench, and to hand him a flower, their fingers almost touching. And at their final meeting Gladia not only removes her glove but takes Baley's hand and then touches his cheek, and Baley feels a sense of loss as she leaves.
Finally, however,
The Naked Sun
is about Elijah Baley and his battle against agoraphobia.
The Caves of Steel
was concerned mostly with Baley's acceptance of friendship with a robot. Daneel plays a smaller part in
The Naked Sun,
however. For some chapters, after Baley exposes him as a robot in order to get freedom to act, Daneel is out of sight 
entirely. And although he comes up with some speculations about the murder that Baley knocks down (''Logical but not reasonable. Wasn't that the definition of a robot?"), he does not participate in the murder's resolution, being on his way to Leebig's house (a final irony that Baley himself notes: Leebig committed suicide rather than meet one of the robots he loved).
The key image of the novel after the naked sun is "walls." The first sentence speaks of Baley's panic at the thought of leaving the protection of his New York City walls and of flying to Washington, even though the trip itself would never expose Baley to the open air "The New York Runway Number 2 . . . was decently enclosed, with a lock opening to the unprotected atmosphere only after air speed had been achieved." The airplane has no windows and a news-strip unrolls constantly at eye level with news and short fiction to distract travelers. Baley even tells himself:
I'm enclosed. This plane is just a little City.
But he didn't fool himself. There was an inch of steel at his left; he could feel it with his elbow. Past that, nothing
Well, air! But that was nothing, really.
A thousand miles of it in one direction. A thousand in another. One mile of it, maybe two, straight down.
He almost wished he could see straight down, glimpse the top of the buried Cities he was passing over; New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington. He imagined the rolling, low-slung cluster complexes of domes he had never seen but knew to be there. And under them, for a mile underground and dozens of miles in every direction, would be the Cities.
The endless, living corridors of the Cities, he thought, alive with people; apartments, community kitchens, factories, Expressways, all comfortable and warm with the evidence of man.
From Washington, Baley goes to a spaceship and experiences an Earth night ("Baley shivered spasmodically in the raw, open air"), but it is not so bad because "the night closed in . . . like dark black walls melting into a black ceiling overhead." Then he must travel by Spacer vessel, by Jump through hyperspace, to Solaria. That is not so bad either because the spaceship is all enclosed like a small city and even larger than an airplane. The first crisis comes when the spaceship is scheduled to land on Solaria, and Baley is told it will land in daylight. He will "have to step out onto the unprotected surface of a planet in daytime." He is fighting panic again as the first chapter ends.

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