Episode: 4360
Title: HPR4360: Isaac Asimov: The Robot Novels
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4360/hpr4360.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 23:40:54

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,360.
For Friday the 18th of April 2025, today's show is entitled, Isaac Esemov, The Robot
Novels.
It is part of the series' science fiction and fantasy.
It is hosted by Ahukah and is about 14 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, a look at the Robot Novels of Isaac Esemov.
Hello, this is Ahukah, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in our ongoing series on science fiction.
And today I'm going to talk about Isaac Esemov's Robot Novels.
He previously looked at the short stories that Esemov wrote featuring the robots, but
then he wrote a few novels featuring them as well, and they take things in a slightly
different direction.
The short stories were all near future stories that never left the solar system, so the setting
is quite recognizable to the contemporary reader.
But then Esemov looked further into the future and speculated about a time when the human
race had started to split into two factions, Earthers and Spacers.
Earthers are of course the remaining inhabitants of the planet Earth, and it is an odd Earth.
The first novel in the series, The Caves of Steel, is set on Earth, which now has a population
of 8 billion people.
For Esemov, this dependous population implies people living underground in conditions of
scarcity, hence the name Caves of Steel.
They live in levels of steel streets and rooms, all below ground, and are so agoraphobic
that they never go outdoors at all, and they refuse to have any robots.
Interestingly, the population of the Earth, as of 2024, is estimated to be, well, just
about 8 million, so Esemov was not right about the effect of such a population.
But it may have been a kind of projection on his part.
As he was very claustrophilic, that's the opposite of claustrophobic, he liked being
shut up, closed in.
His mind would wander the universe, but he himself would be very happy in a closet with
a typewriter for 16 hours a day.
He refused to fly on airplanes, for instance, though he seemed okay with trains.
He mostly stayed in his home in Manhattan, and only attended science fiction conventions
if they were convenient by ground's transportation.
Now the spacers were the opposite kind of society.
They were happy being outdoors, traveled through space, and used robots in every aspect of their
society quite happily.
It is clear that Esemov was trying to make this contrast, and actually to suggest that
neither side was entirely right.
And he implies that this outcome was the result of a sorting process, as the more adventurous
people went to space and settled other planets, while the more timid stayed on Earth.
Now, I don't think the sociological analysis really holds up on, yes.
But I have seen similar claims made about people who head for the frontier, versus those
who stay home.
On the other hand, he draws a spacer society that is in many ways too dependent on their
robot servants, in a way that suggests parallels to the situation in the United States and
19th century, between the slave owning southern society that lacked any dynamism, versus the
northern society with its growing industrial base.
And we know which side prevailed in that conflict.
And the spacers are so in love with their wealthy lifestyle that they deliberately restrict
births, so it's not to dilute the wealth too much.
The focus of these novels, therefore, is not on the robot's per se.
They are taken for granted as part of the background.
The real focus is on these two societies.
As for the structure of the novels, they are all a combination of science fiction and
mystery.
Each one has murder as the central plot point, and finding the murderer becomes the main
action.
But in doing that, each society is subjected to in-depth scrutiny, in much the same way
as reading Sherlock Holmes becomes both a mystery to be solved, and a close look at
Victorian slash Edwardian society and more Victorian in the end.
So the first novel, Caves of Steel, this was serialized in 1953, then published as a book
in 1954, and it introduces the main characters.
One is a detective named Elijah Bailey, an officer in the New York City Police Department.
The other is a human-related robot, and Android, named R. Daniel Olivar.
The R was customarily put at the beginning to identify it as a robot.
He was built by a spacer named Raj Nemina Sarton, who was an ambassador from the Spacers
to Earth, and Daniel is an exact double of Sarton.
If this sounds a lot like data from Star Trek, I would suggest the writers of Star Trek
were very often well-known science fiction authors, who were very well read in the classics
of the field, and certainly would have read this novel.
Now when you have robots like Daniel, identifying them as robots by putting the R in front makes
a certain amount of sense, because he passes for human.
Now the Spacers have sent people like Sarton to Earth as ambassadors, but they have a goal
beyond friendly relations.
Some among the Spacer community have realized that their society is stagnating due to
negative population growth and longevity.
They need to get an infusion of vigor that the Earthmen have, and to that end they want
to convince Earthmen to accept robots and leave their planet to go to the stars.
Of course there is a faction on Earth totally opposed to all of this, who are called the
Medievalists, who are vehemently anti-robot, but also opposed to living in underground
steel caves, and it turns out that one of their number has committed the murder.
The essence of the book, once you get over the mystery plot, is that Elijah and Daniel
come to know more about each other in the societies they come from, and often this means
that as you explain your society to an outsider, you come to question some of the things you've
always taken for granted.
Now there have been a number of adaptations.
There was a TV adaptation by the BBC in 1964, but it has not survived.
Unfortunately, a lot of BBC TV just did not survive from that era.
There was a BBC radio adaptation by Bert Kools, that was done in 1989, and I once had
a copy of that on tape, if you remember audio cassettes.
It's not bad at all, and you can get it on the internet archive, and there's a link
in the show notes that you can get that, and it's worth a listen if you enjoy audio entertainment.
Now, the second novel is called The Naked Sun, and this novel is set in the exact opposite
society to the first one.
The first one was set on Earth, this is set on the planet Solaria, which even among
spacers is extreme.
The population is rigidly controlled to more than 20,000 humans, and all of the work is
done by robots, who outnumber humans by 10,000 to 1.
Solarians abhor contact with other humans, even other Solarians, and will use online viewing
if they need to talk to someone.
Not surprisingly, they are advanced in artificial manners of having children, and one of the
people involved in this work, Recan Del Mar, is murdered.
This is very unusual because robots cannot murder a person due to the first law, and most
other humans cannot stand to be in the same room with another person.
But because of his success in solving the murder of Sarton back on Earth, Elijah Bailey
is requested by the otherwise hostile government of Solaria to come and investigate, and he
is reunited with his old partner, Ar Daniel Oliva, and the government of Earth asked him
to look for weaknesses in Solarian society.
Suspicion naturally falls on the wife of Recan, who is a woman named Gladia, because she
was in the house when he was murdered, but she has no memory of anything related to the
murder, and there is no sign of a murder weapon.
One was beaten to death with some kind of blunt instrument, but there is no sign.
The only other thing of note is a badly malfunctioning robot that has suffered damage to its
positonic brain, because it failed to prevent harm to a human in violation of the first law.
The detective team eventually solved the mystery, and when Bailey returns to Earth, he informs
the government that the features of Spacer society that were seen as strengths are in
fact weaknesses.
The robots, low population, and longevity all combine to make them decadent and incapable
of progressing further.
Now there have been some adaptations here.
The BBC anthology series out of the unknown did this in 1969.
Again, as we saw with the Doctor Who stories, the BBC wiped the tapes once it had been
broadcast.
Now there is a third novel in the trilogy called The Robots of Dawn, and it was written
some years later.
As we discussed previously, Asimov stopped writing fiction for a while to concentrate
on educational writings following the Sputnik launch.
He came back to this to look at a possible third kind of society to be found on the
planet of Rora, and of course, Aurora is the Latin word for dawn.
Aurora has robots to be sure, but not as extreme as Slaria.
And there is a faction there that sees the wisdom in encouraging Earth people to leave
their planet and net out to the stars.
Meanwhile, Elijah Bailey and his son Ben are among the Earth people who are learning
to overcome their extreme agoraphobia so that they can do just that.
And of course, there has to be a murder mystery on Aurora that requires Elijah Bailey and
our Daniel Oliva to team up once again.
The twist though is it is the murder of a robot, a humaniform robot like our Daniel Oliva
named our gender panel.
In this case, the robot has been given a mind block.
The man who created our gender is Hans Falstaff, who appeared in a minor role in the case
of steel.
He is the main suspect and even admits he is the only one with the skill to do it, but
he denies having done it.
A fanstalf is one of the leaders of the faction on Aurora that favors the Earth, so the
authorities on Earth are very anxious that he be exonerated.
Of course, there is another faction that wants Aurora alone to colonize the galaxy and
it is headed up by fanstalf's chief rival as a roboticist.
Bailey's extreme agoraphobia becomes a plot point in the mystery, but eventually the
murder is solved.
There were no adaptations that I am aware of for this novel.
So summing this up, the overall theme of this trilogy and it will be developed further
in other novels is that the spacers have ended up being soft and relatively unadventurous.
It is clear that Asimov expects that the people of Earth will ultimately inherit the galaxy,
but it is also clear that they will do it without robots because they have learned that
is a trap.
In this way, Asimov started out writing robot stories where the robots were not a danger
but simply useful helpers, and then in this trilogy finds a different danger to worry
about.
Like in the American South under slavery, they produced in the end a society that is stagnant
and resistant to any change at all.
That is quite different from the bloodthirsty robots ravaging Buksom young ladies, but
it is a danger nonetheless.
Now this trilogy was initially intended to be a standalone series, but then Asimov decided
to link these novels with his foundation novels, but to get there we need to discuss something
else, the Empire novels.
It is a little bit of a backtrack, but we will do that the next time.
So for now, this is Ahuka signing off for Hacker Public Radio and is always encouraging
you to support Free Software.
Bye bye.
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