In a country filled with desk jockeys, one can get nostalgic for an era when “pioneering spirit” meant more than an improved stock portfolio. This is the appeal of space opera: They don’t call it the final frontier for nothing. If the intrepid space explorer can win the alien blaster battle, we know we are still conquerors. Asimov, however, veers away from escapism in his robot novels (
The Caves of Steel and
The Naked Sun).
When Asimov was writing these books, the United States had just emerged from World War II as an international superpower. The Cold War settled in and the GIs got back to work. The man in the gray flannel suit emerged. Bereft of heroism, thrust into a new corporate world, he haunts the robot novels. Beneath Asimov’s story of a future Earth struggling under a burgeoning population and resisting robot integration, the decade’s new man struggles for identity and meaning.
Detective Elijah Baley’s greatest fear is being “declassified”: stripped of his rank and put out of a job; made redundant, as the British say. Elijah’s story begins with the insipid and submissive robot that replaces his young human coworker. The presence of robots - in city hall, waiting on customers at a shoe store, serving in homes - has the tightly-packed human population on edge, resentful of the machines and the wealthy Spacers (residents of Earth’s former colonies) who brought them. Earth’s struggle, as a former imperialist power outstripped by the Spacers, is the struggle of workers to retain their livelihoods in the face of higher technology and an uncaring elite. Replaceability, that great human terror of the industrial age, is at the fore of the robot novels.
To solve a murder in the Spacer community in New York City, Elijah has to work with Daneel, a humanoid robot. Elijah’s unqualified bigotry is rapidly replaced by respect, and eventually admiration for his new colleague. Renouncing his devotion to Earth’s self-destructive status quo, and shunning the police commissioner’s nostalgia for Earth’s idealized past, Elijah begins to advocate for a balance: C/Fe. Carbon/Iron – an alliance of humanity and machine. Our hardboiled individualist detective comes to symbolize blending and balance, the alliance of organic and technological, cooperation and individualism.
Earth has burrowed into itself, shunning space exploration for centuries, walling itself away from nature and other planets in enclosed cities that people are terrified to leave. Asimov repeatedly likens this to a return to the womb, a refusal to grow into an adult, the infantilization of humanity. The solution, Elijah decides, is joint human/robot colonization of new worlds, a fulfillment of the masculine ideal – Manifest Destiny writ large. Elijah is an old-fashioned, rugged individualist living in a society whose greatest value is quasi-socialist civic duty. Elijah can be read as a return of the cowboy or the war hero, emerging from the womb-like city that crushes his individuality and venturing forth into the unspoiled wilderness of the stars.
Except that Elijah never actually conquers anything. His dreams of human escape from Earth are reserved for his son. He has to deal with the messy realities of interstellar politics, a reluctant Earth government, and a couple nasty murders that bring the tensions between Spacers, Earthmen and robots to a head. Asimov’s story is not one of conquest, but of compromise. Elijah begins confident in his closed-mindedness, then falters and changes his worldview over the course of the novels, based on alliances he’s forged with his natural enemies, aliens and machines. He advocates for change and progress. The human apes have to leave their caves of steel – the enclosed, womb-like cities – in order to find their destiny among the stars, but they can’t do it without help. This is no self-contained hero. This cowboy needs the Indians or he’ll never make it.
Elijah is perhaps the unlikeliest of heroes. He spends both books violating Spacer customs, embarrassing himself by misunderstanding his cases, and revealing his weaknesses. For example, in
The Naked Sun, he has to learn to endure the open sky of the planet Solaria, after a lifetime of living under a dome in New York. His reactions are neurotic, frequently causing him to black out and panic, requiring rescue by Daneel.
Risk, Asimov argues, is a requirement of our humanity. As Earth declines through overpopulation and galactic isolation, the Solarians decay through leisure. Robots have removed all obstacles from their lives, so that they become a weak and isolated elite. (This is similar to the Eloi in H.G. Wells’
The Time Machine – where a leisure class is so coddled by the working class that they evolve into cheerful little fools, incapable of intellectual or artistic pursuits.) The populations of both planets have become stagnant, afraid and unwilling to change. At one point a Solarian sociologist tells Elijah that humanity having all its needs fulfilled represents the “end of human history.” Our ambition and struggle define us. Robots threaten to replace humanity not through uprising, but by humanity's quiet descent into irrelevance.
[This post joins recent others as part of this semester's independent study in SF literature, guided by my adviser, Cyrus Patell. He's addressed Asimov's depiction of NYC as a hive city on his blog
Patell and Waterman's History of New York.]
Anyway, a friend I haven't seen in 10 years discovered this profile and contacted me through Veganica. I was overjoyed to hear from him, but somewhat chagrined at the inaccurate version of Erika he found online (see visual manifestation left versus newer photo below right). 
I experienced a miniature time warp viewing the profile again, having not updated it for years. (With apologies to site creator Derek Goodwin.) Who was this person Erika who talks about her poetry and enthusiastically calls herself a baby vegan? 
