Signal Watch Reads: Caves of Steel (1953)

I have a few books I return to every once in a while.  Frankenstein.  Fahrenheit 451.  The Hunter.  Red Harvest.  

But in this century, I haven't come back to Caves of Steel, a book I read first in Sixth grade and probably last looked at in 11th grade.  Which is odd. If you asked me if I liked it, I'd have given you a definite thumbs-up.

At the time I first read it, I was aware I was reading something published more than thirty years prior - but that wasn't entirely new to me.  I'd read kids fiction and non-fiction books written in the fifties.  I was aware of the 1950's and 60's belief in atomic energy, which had fallen apart in the wake of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.  As a young child, I'd read speculative non-fiction about where we were headed - and firmly believed that humanity's future would be one of robotic pals, cybernetics and star-faring pioneering.

Well, two out of three ain't bad.

Caves of Steel met me after I'd read some Bradbury, and at the time, the two sci-fi writers I understood to be the giants were Ray Bradbury - who was a weaver of  myth and humanist more than a sci-fi writer - and Isaac Asimov, who was a hard-core OG scienctification fiction writer.  He held degrees, was a professor, and held in high regard.

If Bradbury was the poet of the Midwest who saw deep into humanity's heart, Asimov was the prognosticator with a scientific bent.  In the mid-80's, he was considered a bit of a seer for the future of technology and its issues and promise.  

In 8th grade Computer Literacy class, we were even taught Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.  I, of course, already knew them by heart and recited them to my class, understanding them in the context of a handful of Asimov's robot books.

Yup.  I was an 80's nerd saved from wedgies only because I was a foot taller than my classmates.

Re-reading Caves of Steel was truly a journey of getting back in touch with that kid who walked around with his robot books, not quite ready for adult matters, but curious to read what seemed like adult fiction.  And it was sort of mind-boggling to realize what a touchstone this book, and likely the film Blade Runner, had to have been for my squishy kid brain.

Caves of Steel is about a police detective (see where we're headed?) who is partnered with the first humanoid-passing robot (and there it is) in order to solve a murder.  The results of their investigation will have galaxy-spanning consequences.

As readers of Foundation will know, Asimov used fiction less to tell compelling character-based stories and more to kick around hypotheticals about a future with technology the way he saw it headed.  And, no doubt, Asimov was keeping up with the latest.

Toward the end of his life, he gave this interview on AI (1991).

If Bradbury seemed to understand almost magically what it was to be 12-years-old (do yourself a favor and read Something Wicked This Way Comes) Asimov seemed like the informed scientist spinning yarns to teach you something you didn't know you were learning along the way as his characters sorted through ethical and philosophical debates.  His books were not logic puzzles, but they were guideposts to better pondering things as they were and how this meant things might be, and what we'd have to consider.

Starting with the short stories Asimov published together as I, Robot (a must read), humanity's resentment of robots and their positronic brains and superior bodies becomes the grounding for where we're headed.  Mankind fears replacement as a species to a lesser degree than it resents the certainty that what humans do will no longer be the work of humanity, it will be left to more efficient machines who do not tire or take sick days or want promotions or a better life.

In no way does all of this feel incredibly immediate.

The world of the book takes place a few thousand years from now.  The United States remains intact as some sort of entity, but across the world, people have moved into cities, and the cities have become gigantic singular structures that people never leave.  They may travel to another city, but they never go outside.  Weather and sunlight are unknown to them.  Thus, "caves of steel".  

Homo Sapiens have split into two factions, Earthers who live in those cities, and Spacers, the descendants of the colonizers on a few dozen worlds across the galaxy.  While humanity on Earth is headed for collapse as over-population looms ahead of them, the spacers have created a society in which genetic perfection is required or the baby is, ahem, dealt with.  But they've also pushed their engineering and have a navy that can pretty much take down Earth without tremendous effort if needed.

Problem:  the Spacers are deeply immunocompromised as they have not been raised on Earth with Earth diseases for several generations.  

Essentially, Spacers and Earthers are at an odd stalemate where the Spacers hold some power over Earth and want to introduce robots into Earth culture.

Outside the walls of the cities, robots toil to produce the food of the staggering 6 billion population - which now exists on a variety of yeast products?  (You will get so sick of the word "yeast" by the time you finish this book.  Yeast.  Yeast.  It's like I can't even hear it anymore.)  Inside, the people live on strict schedules and careful rationing.

Elijah Bailey is our 42 year old police detective with a teen-aged son.  He's married to Jessie, the very model of a 1950's housewife, which is maybe the most dated thing in the book.

After the murder of a prominent Spacer roboticist, Bailey is teamed - to his dismay - with R. Daneel Olivaw, a near perfect replica of a human on the outside, but inside, all machine.  He has been programmed with a "justice" circuit, and will apply his robot logic and abilities to assist Lije.

Yes, this is a buddy-cop pairing story.  That it was not made into a movie in 1987 is utterly baffling.

What you need to know is that it's essentially Lije Bailey sorting through the nature of humankind, the natural aversion to technological upheavals, the logic of robots and what is and is not possible with a robot built with a positronic brain that would go up in smoke if not for the Three Laws of Robotics.

The story tracks the slow change of Bailey from a typical Earther, distrusting of robots, to feeling there's a future where he could even consider R. Daneel a sort of friend (there are three more books) as Elijah and Daneel talk through the cultural aspects of the case - Earther, Spacer and robot.

Returning to the book now - it's a bit of a mess as a mystery.  You'd clock the murderer immediately, and the book is so focused on keeping the circle of characters small, there aren't any real red-herring suspects.  It's going to be less about who and more about the how and why.  As a procedural, you'll wonder why they don't do things like visit the crime scene, but do spend hours discussing a shift in human/ robot relations.  And that's really the point.

Written in 1953, it's misogynistic even for its time.  Jessie, the one real female character, is written like she has a child's brain and emotions and it's hard to see why Lije is in love with her.  Other female characters are an assortment of "types" for Lije to roll his eyes at.  Which is odd, as Asimov's initial hero in other works is Dr. Susan Calvin, a no nonsense roboticist.  One wonders what pressures there were in the period where it was published.  I don't recall too many other women portrayed this way in Asimov's fiction, but it's been a while.

Asimov didn't anticipate things like personal computers, the internet, surveillance cameras and more.  He seems to think 8 billion is an outrageous number of human lives on the planet, and that we'd only meet in a few thousand years.  We're over 8 billion *now*.

Anyway, engineering and science catch up with you fast.  We're as far from this book as the book was from 1880 when Edison's lightbulb was patented, so fair's fair.

What endures are the archetypes of Elijah Bailey the very human cop and his robot pal, R. Daneel Olivaw.  And, I think, the understanding of man's nature that provides the fundamental underpinnings of the book.  

People are comfortable in their grooves, even as the water temperature rises and they begin to boil in place.  But they also maybe rightfully have technology forced upon them that will take food out of their mouth - and the out of touch folk above are usually happy to force it on them in the name of progress.

What was coded as an odd mix of techno-shock manifesting looking like racism in this book has trickled into our own world.  Half-jokingly, people have dubbed AI and robots as "clankers".  And I suspect it's just a matter of time before data centers start having little accidents that lead to fires as people push back.  And, yeah, there's *not* a lot of compelling reasons for robots to get involved in city-life on Earth in the book without taking jobs, and maybe the application *is* clumsy (do we need robot shoe sales persons?).

And in this way, of late, my mind has returned a bit to Asimov's robot work.  So it was nice to revisit these characters and this book.