The Naked Sun (2 page)

The only trouble was that Gnome Press was just barely surviving, and it never did get around to giving me clear semiannual statements, or much in the way of payments. (That went for my three
Foundation
books, which Gnome Press also published.)

In 1961, Doubleday became aware of the fact that Gnome Press was having trouble, and they arranged to take over
I, Robot
(and the
Foundation
books, too). From then on, all the books did much better. In fact,
I, Robot
has remained in print ever since it was first published. That’s thirty-three years now. In 1981, it was even sold to the movies, although no motion picture has yet been made. It has also appeared in eighteen different foreign languages that I know of, including Russian and Hebrew.

But I’m getting way ahead of the story.

Let’s go back to 1952, at which time
I, Robot
was just plodding along as a Gnome Press book, and I had no hint of any real success.

By that time, new top-notch science-fiction magazines had come out and the field was in one of its periodic “booms.”
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
appeared in 1949, and
Galaxy Science Fiction
in 1950. With that John Campbell lost his monopoly of the field, and the “Golden Age” of the 1940s was over.

I began to write for Horace Gold, the editor of
Galaxy
, and with some relief, too. For a period of eight years, I had written for Campbell exclusively and I had come to feel that I was a one-editor writer and that if anything happened to Campbell, I would be through. My success in selling to Gold relieved my
anxieties in this respect. Gold even serialized my second novel,
The Stars, Like Dust …
, although he changed its title to
Tyrann
, which I considered awful.

Nor was Gold my only new editor. I sold a robot story to Howard Browne, who edited
Amazing
during a brief period when it tried to be a quality magazine. The story, entitled “Satisfaction Guaranteed,” appeared in the April 1951 issue of that magazine.

That was an exception, though. On the whole, I had no intention of writing further robot stories at that time. The appearance of
I, Robot
seemed to have brought that portion of my literary career to its natural close, and I was moving on to other things.

Gold, however, having published one serial by me, was perfectly willing to try another, especially since a new novel I had written,
The Currents of Space
, had been taken by Campbell for serialization.

On April 19, 1952, Gold and I were talking over the matter of a new novel that was to appear in
Galaxy
. He suggested a robot novel. I shook my head firmly. My robots had appeared only in short stories, and I was not at all sure I could write a whole novel based on robots.

“Sure you can,” said Gold. “How about an over-populated world in which robots are taking over human jobs?”

“Too depressing,” I said. “I’m not sure I want to handle a heavy sociological story.”

“Do it your way. You like mysteries. Put a murder in such a world and have a detective solve it with a robot partner. If the detective doesn’t solve it, the robot will replace him.”

That struck fire. Campbell had often said that a science-fiction mystery story was a contradiction in terms; that advances in technology could be used to
get detectives out of their difficulties unfairly, and that the readers would therefore be cheated.

I sat down to write a story that would be a classic mystery and that would not cheat the reader—and yet would be a true science-fiction story. The result was
The Caves of Steel
. It appeared in
Galaxy
as a three-part serial in the October, November, and December 1953 issues, and in 1954, it was published by Doubleday as my eleventh book.

There was no question but that
The Caves of Steel
was my most successful book to date. It sold better than any of my earlier books; it elicited nicer letters from readers; and (best proof of all) Doubleday smiled at me with greater warmth than ever before. Until that point, they wanted outlines and chapters from me before handing me contracts, but after that I got my contracts on my mere statement that I was going to write another book.

The Caves of Steel
was so successful, in fact, that it was inevitable that I write a sequel. I would have started it at once, I think, if I had not just begun to write science popularizations and found I enjoyed doing that tremendously. It was not till October 1955 that I actually began
The Naked Sun
.

Once begun, however, it went smoothly. In many ways, it balanced the earlier book.
The Caves of Steel
took place on Earth, a world of many human beings and few robots, while
The Naked Sun
took place on Solaria, a world of few human beings and many robots. What’s more, although my books are generally devoid of romance, I actually introduced an understated love story into
The Naked Sun
.

I was entirely satisfied with the sequel, and in my heart, thought it was even better than
The Caves of Steel
, but what was I to do with it? I had grown somewhat
estranged from Campbell, who had taken up an odd bit of pseudoscience called dianetics and had managed to become interested in flying saucers, in psionics, and in various other questionable matters. On the other hand, I owed him a great deal and I felt rather guilty over having largely shifted to Gold, who had had two of my serials in a row. But as he had nothing to do with the planning of
The Naked Sun
, I could dispose of it as I wished.

I offered the novel to Campbell, therefore, and he took it at once. It appeared as a three-part serial in the October, November, and December 1956 issues of
Astounding
, and Campbell didn’t change my title, either. In 1957, it was published by Doubleday as my twentieth book.

It did just as well as
The Caves of Steel
, if not better, and Doubleday at once pointed out I couldn’t leave it there. I would have to write a third book and make it a trilogy, just as my three
Foundation
books made up a trilogy.

I fully agreed. I had a rough idea of the plot of the third book, and I had a title—
The Bounds of Infinity
.

In July 1958, the family was taking a three-week vacation in a house at the shore in Marshfield, Massachusetts, and it was my plan to get to work and do a sizable chunk of the new novel there. It was going to be set on Aurora, where the human/robot balance was to be neither overweighted in the direction of the human as in
The Caves of Steel
nor in the direction of the robot as in
The Naked Sun
. What’s more, the element of romance was to be much strengthened.

I was all set—and yet, something was wrong. I had grown steadily more interested in non-fiction in the 1950s, and for the first time, I started a novel
which wouldn’t catch fire. After four chapters, I faded out and gave up. I decided that in my heart I felt I couldn’t handle the romance, couldn’t balance the human/robot mixture in properly equal fashion.

For twenty-five years, that was the way it remained. Neither
The Caves of Steel
nor
The Naked Sun
died or went out of print. They appeared together in
The Robot Novels;
they appeared with a group of short stories in
The Rest of the Robots
. And they appeared in various softcover editions.

For twenty-five years, therefore, readers had them available to read and, I presume, enjoy. As a result, many wrote me to ask for a third novel. At conventions they asked me directly. It became the most sure-fire request I was to receive (except the request for a fourth
Foundation
novel).

And whenever I was asked if I intended to write a third robot novel, I always answered, “Yes—someday—so pray for a long life for me.”

Somehow, I felt I ought to, but as the years passed I grew more and more certain that I couldn’t handle it, and more and more sadly convinced that the third novel was never going to be written.

And yet, in March of 1983, I presented Doubleday with the “long-awaited” third robot novel. It has no connection whatever with the ill-fated attempt of 1958, and its name is
The Robots of Dawn
.

—Isaac Asimov
New York City

Stubbornly Elijah Baley fought panic.

For two weeks it had been building up. Longer than that, even. It had been building up ever since they had called him to Washington and there calmly told him he was being reassigned.

The call to Washington had been disturbing enough in itself. It came without details, a mere summons; and that made it worse. It included travel slips directing round trip by plane and that made it still worse.

Partly it was the sense of urgency introduced by any order for plane travel. Partly it was the thought of the plane; simply that. Still, that was just the beginning of uneasiness and, as yet, easy to suppress.

After all, Lije Baley had been in a plane four times before. Once he had even crossed the continent. So, while plane travel is never pleasant, it would, at least, not be a complete step into the unknown.

And then, the trip from New York to Washington would take only an hour. The take-off would be from New York Runway Number 2, which, like all official Runways, was decently enclosed, with a lock opening to the unprotected atmosphere only after air speed had been achieved. The arrival would be at Washington
Runway Number 5, which was similarly protected.

Furthermore, as Baley well knew, there would be no windows on the plane. There would be good lighting, decent food, all necessary conveniences. The radio-controlled flight would be smooth; there would scarcely be any sensation of motion once the plane was airborne.

He explained all this to himself, and to Jessie, his wife, who had never been airborne and who approached such matters with terror.

She said, “But I don’t
like
you to take a plane, Lije. It isn’t natural. Why can’t you take the Expressways?”

“Because that would take ten hours”—Baley’s long face was set in dour lines—“and because I’m a member of the City Police Force and have to follow the orders of my superiors. At least, I do if I want to keep my C-6 rating.”

There was no arguing with that.

Baley took the plane and kept his eyes firmly on the news-strip that unreeled smoothly and continuously from the eye-level dispenser. The City was proud of that service: news, features, humorous articles, educational bits, occasional fiction. Someday the strips would be converted to film, it was said, since enclosing the eyes with a viewer would be an even more efficient way of distracting the passenger from his surroundings.

Baley kept his eyes on the unreeling strip, not only for the sake of distraction, but also because etiquette required it. There were five other passengers on the plane (he could not help noticing that much) and each one of them had his private right to whatever
degree of fear and anxiety his nature and upbringing made him feel.

Baley would certainly resent the intrusion of anyone else on his own uneasiness. He wanted no strange eyes on the whiteness of his knuckles where his hands gripped the armrest, or the dampish stain they would leave when he took them away.

He told 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, hiving corridors of the Cities, he thought, alive with people; apartments, community kitchens, factories, Expressways; all comfortable and warm with the evidence of man.

And he himself was isolated in the cold and featureless air in a small bullet of metal, moving through emptiness.

His hands trembled, and he forced his eyes to focus on the strip of paper and read a bit.

It was a short story dealing with Galactic exploration
and it was quite obvious that the hero was an Earthman.

Baley muttered in exasperation, then held his breath momentarily in dismay at his boorishness in making a sound.

It was completely ridiculous, though. It was pandering to childishness, this pretense that Earthmen could invade space. Galactic exploration! The Galaxy was closed to Earthmen. It was preempted by the Spacers, whose ancestors had been Earthmen centuries before. Those ancestors had reached the Outer Worlds first, found themselves comfortable, and their descendants had lowered the bars to immigration. They had penned in Earth and their Earthman cousins. And Earth’s City civilization completed the task, imprisoning Earthmen within the Cities by a wall of fear of open spaces that barred them from the robot-run farming and mining areas of their own planet; from even that.

Baley thought bitterly: Jehoshaphat! If we don’t like it, let’s do something about it. Let’s not just waste time with fairy tales.

But there was nothing to do about it, and he knew it.

Then the plane landed. He and his fellow-passengers emerged and scattered away from one another, never looking.

Baley glanced at his watch and decided there was time for freshening before taking the Expressway to the Justice Department. He was glad there was. The sound and clamor of life, the huge vaulted chamber of the airport with City corridors leading off on numerous levels, everything else he saw and heard, gave him the feeling of being safely and warmly enclosed in the bowels and womb of the City.
It washed away anxiety and only a shower was necessary to complete the job.