Locked Room Library #1: THE CAVES OF STEEL (1953)

Originally posted June 14, 2024.

“But now, Earthmen are all so coddled, so enwombed in their imprisoning caves of steel, that they are caught forever.”

When thinking about how to organize my blogging chronicle of the 99 Novels for a Locked Room Library, I settled on a randomly-generated order (with some leeway for availability) to avoid twenty straight weeks of John Dickson Carr. That means we’re kicking off the series with an unusual entry: Isaac Asimov’s science fiction murder mystery The Caves of Steel. Asimov is best known for the Robot series, followed by other influential SF like the Foundation trilogy, but he was a mystery lover who wrote some stories of his own, including the later Black Widower series (of which I’ve only read “The Cross of Lorraine”). Caves of Steel is both: a fair-play mystery follow-up to the stories in I, Robot, investigated by a human/robot duo, and the result is rather unique.

The Locked Room:

A pioneering roboticist is shot on his doorstep in an off-worlder settlement just outside New York. The only people with a motivation to kill him are the City dwellers, but the entrance to Spacetown from New York is through a tight security checkpoint.

“But wait,” you say, “how is it a locked room if he was shot on his doorstep?” We’ll come back to that.

The Story:

You can’t discuss the mystery without discussing the world. Caves of Steel is set 3000 years into the future on a struggling earth. In the year 5000, the population has reached—gasp!—EIGHT BILLION PEOPLE, which as far as science fiction predictions go, is about on par with the New York Times announcing that airplanes would be possible in ten million years 69 days before Kitty Hawk. New York has been transformed into a capital-C City, basically an enormous self-contained building navigated by moving walkways. City dwellers have to prove that their skills are valuable to society, or risk having their jobs taken over by shitty robots. Working a skilled job entitles you to such amazing economic perks as “an apartment,” “children,” “a separate shower,” and “chicken”. All very fantastical, I know.

Humanity achieved space travel thousands of years earlier, and the population of the “Outer Worlds” have come back to Uno-reverse colonize Earth. “Spacers” have a very different culture: an integrated human-robot society, and long-lived individuals who each inhabit their own separate dome in the open air, eating fresh produce just outside of city limits. They’re also very susceptible to Earth diseases, and so tightly regulate and monitor any City-dwellers coming in (this used to be achieved through a force field, but has been reduced to screening travellers). The situation is a pressure-cooker of resentment and xenophobia. Dr. Roj Nemennuh Sarton is a roboticist working on undercover robots to infiltrate the City in order to facilitate Spacer/City-dweller relations, so when he’s shot with a blaster, it’s assumed to be an assassination by Earth “Medievalists” (people who want to return to pre-robot 20th-century culture).

The protagonist is Elijah “Lije” Baley, a scruffy homicide detective. Previously he thought his work was pretty safe, relying on human traits like observation and curiosity. but when Dr. Sarton is murdered, the Spacers assign him to work with one of their own robots (or “Rs”), a completely humanoid model named R. Daneel Olivaw. Lije has to solve the case without Daneel’s help, or he’s out of a job.

Daneel is straight-laced and efficient, but also Three Laws compliant and somewhat literal-minded. We eventually learn that he’s a prototype built by Dr. Sarton, and sort of uncanny valley twin of his creator, who resembles him “as a statue would.” I have to imagine that Data and Dr. Noonien Soong from Star Trek: The Next Generation took some inspiration from these two.

What I’m picturing.

Daneel is a spyware robot, who’s also been programmed with a desire for “justice” so that he can act as a detective. Lije pushes back on the idea that a robot could handle such a vague value, which is absolutely correct—to Daneel, “justice” has quite a concrete definition:

“A human being can recognize the fact that, on the basis of an abstract moral code, some laws may be bad ones and their enforcement unjust. What do you say, R. Daneel?”

“An unjust law,” said R. Daneel evenly, “is a contradiction in terms.”

“To a robot it is, Mr. Baley. So you see, you mustn’t confuse your justice and R. Daneel’s.”

Oh, and he’s also equipped with a positronic peen, as Lije observes in the public shower:

Quite automatically, Baley looked away. Then, with the thought that, after all, R. Daneel’s customs were not City customs, he forced his unwilling eyes back for one moment. His lips quirked in a tiny smile. R. daneel’s resemblance to humanity was not restricted to his face and hands but had been carried out with painstaking accuracy over the entire body.

Thanks, detective, for that keen and strangely homoerotic observation.

So our odd-couple investigators set out to determine how a City dweller could have entered Spacetown with a blaster. Now, you might have picked up on the fact that Spacetown is a town, and that just because the road is blocked, does not mean that it’s hermetically sealed. If I said that there was a murder in Staten Island, and the killer could only have been from downtown New York, but the ferry was closed—there are lots of possibilities you could imagine. Maybe they took a rowboat, or a helicopter, or, or, or. This is where the worldbuilding comes in, because the question is a psychological one: while Daneel comes up with this possibility immediately, Lije doesn’t think of it. No New Yorker would. For City dwellers, who never see the light of day, the idea of leaving the City to travel on foot across the countryside is unthinkable. Like asking your friend from downtown to go somewhere outside of the TTC line.

The problem is, it would be impossible for a person to smuggle a gun through the checkpoint entrance. And robots are supposed to be incapable of harming humans. That leaves a couple of other bold-but-out-there possibilities. Lije comes up with one, Daneel comes up with another. But the actual solution does indeed fit all the physical and psychological parameters we’re given.

Solution Satisfaction Rating:

The solution is sound and firmly grounded in the worldbuilding premises we are given. On the other hand, the culprit is—to use a technical term—incredibly bleedin’ obvious. The book only has a handful of characters. The possibilities are limited.

Both structurally and in-universe, Caves of Steel is more concerned with a certain kind of old-school SF dialectic than the murder investigation. The book is oriented around the question of whether an integrated “C/Fe” (human/robot) society is possible, with the characters debating this throughout the book, and ultimately answers it when Lije and Daneel collaborate on solving the murder. But that means that the investigation leading up to this point is somewhat sloppy. At one point Lije tellingly notes that he has been “so involved with his own dilemma that he had forgotten the cold fact of murder.” We get a lot of “Baley assumed that events had gone down like so. He could picture it now…” and failure to share (or inquire about) trivial information. We don’t even see the crime scene until the last chapter. This prevents the reader from accessing some information which, if you had known it upfront, would immediately confirm exactly what went down. As it is, you can merely guess exactly what went down. Murder-wise, the most interesting part is the reverse-locked-room element of trying to figure out who is psychologically capable of leaving the sealed-in main setting. Still, it’s a fun book with plenty of interesting ideas, and does the “buddy cop” genre before its heyday.