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to give away and he always ate them quietly, sitting in a corner with his back to the center of the room. He would eat them quickly for fear of being caught. |
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They tasted all the better for that. |
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There is, in addition, a sense of setting in The Caves of Steel (and in The Naked Sun) that does not exist in The Foundation Trilogy and the robot stories, and for good reason. The Caves of Steel is not only a title but a place, a place that is important to the murder investigation, the psychology of the City's citizens, and the theme of the Spacers trying to induce them to leave its protection. Everywhere Baley goes he is conscious of his surroundings: Enderby's office, the expressway, the Personals, his apartment (contrasted later on with a "grim, lowerclass apartment"), Spacetown, the motorways, a kitchen, a power plant, and Yeast-town. The presence of an outsider, Daneel, brings everything freshly to Baley's awareness. Setting is as necessary to The Caves of Steel as it is unnecessary in The Foundation Trilogy. |
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The Caves of Steel contains other stylistic elements peculiar to science fiction that the mainstream reader might not recognize. Samuel R. Delany commented in a 1979 Modern Language Association meeting that the problem with non-science-fiction readers and critics is that they must be taught to read science fiction sentence by sentence and word by word. In science fiction, he says, the metaphorical may become literal, language has implications that must be understood before the reader is aware of what is going on, and often judgment must be suspended until further information clarifies the situation. |
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In some senses these elements are part of The Caves of Steel. Although Asimov's style, as always, is simple and straightforward, he allows himself the occasional telling metaphor that illuminates the environment and times of the novel. "Medieval," for instance, is that kind of metaphor: it stands for us, our times, our ways. Windows are Medieval. Eyeglasses are Medieval. The (King James) Bible is Medieval, and it is written in Middle English. The reader is intended to understand not only the passage of three thousand years but the false perspective that lumps centuries and millennia together in categories that are too broad for accuracy. |
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The Commissioner calls Baley "a modernist" and goes on to describe a romanticized and false version of life before the Cities: |
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In Medieval times, people lived in the open. I don't mean on the farms only. I mean in the cities, too. Even in New York. When it rained, they didn't think of it as waste. They gloried in it. They lived close to nature. |
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