The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov 📚

Finished reading: The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov

❗️Disclaimer: Possible spoilers ahead.

It’s the fifth or sixth millennium AD and the Earth is overpopulated and its resources exhausted. Humans live underground in the so-called Caves of Steel because Cities can remain insulated/cut off from the rest of the planet. The Spacers are abusing the mother planet while their Fifty Worlds stand seemingly united at least in their hatred toward Earth people and they refuse to intermingle with them for fear of disease since the Spacers had overcome them for themselves.

They consider them inferior in general, and don’t shy from imposing their will and disregard for the self-determination of Earth’s inhabitants. For that purpose, they gradually introduce more and more robots into the workforce that make the already plagued by scarcity job market even more overcrowded.

Spacetown was established as Spacer-only aboveground city in New York to ensure the success of their project. This took place some 25 years before the events of this book. The official purpose of this outpost was to put together a program of “modernization,” hence the introduction of the robots into the economy. Reminds me a lot of the IMF and World Bank’s programs after WWII with their forced ideals of “development” on the Gobal South.

Later it turns out that all the Spacers wanted was for Earth to settle the galaxy because they saw that as the only solution to Earth’s and their inevitable problems. That worldview was restricted to Spacetown and no one else (such as the Spacer governments). The Medievalists faction’s hatred for robots unintentionally exposed all of this through a Spacer’s murder investigation and Elijah’s Baley’s continuous working with them. In the end he even befriends Daneel.

Rating: 4.5/5