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Page 107
Both Asimov and Horace Gold, who could not leave his apartment for many years, would have enjoyed at least some aspects of life in the caves of steel.
But even the attractions or repulsions of the caves of steel are not at the heart of the novel. The reader wants Baley to accept Daneel, and that acceptance, in the final pages, rewards the reader's expectations with the glow of a resolution satisfyingly accomplished. The novel is, in a term later made popular in film, a "buddy" story like The Defiant Ones or 48 Hours, or the pilot film for Alien Nation.
The situation in The Naked Sun is the reverse of that in The Caves of Steel. Asimov wrote it out of an emotion other than his love for enclosed environments. He concluded his brief essay on his claustrophilia in Nightfall and Other Stories with the comment:
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. . . sometimes twice in one week, when I feel I've put in a good day's work, I go out in the late afternoon and take a walk through the neighborhood.
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But I don't know. That thing you people have up there in the sky. It's got quite a glare to it.
That glare is the sustaining metaphor in The Naked Sun. Where The Caves of Steel has the feeling of enclosure, The Naked Sun has the feeling of wide-open spaces. Where Earth is concerned with overpopulation, Solaria in The Naked Sun is almost unpopulated: it has only twenty thousand humans (but two hundred million robots), and estates can cover ten thousand square miles. Where Earth is concerned with competition from robots, Solaria is overrun by them, specializes in their production, and exports them to all the other Outer Worlds. And where the endemic psychological problem of Earthmen is agoraphobia, the problem of Solarians is agoraphilia. Solarians so love the feeling of virgin space around them that they seldom come into personal contact with each other. On Solaria a culture has developed in which "viewing" by trimension is the custom, where most Solarians cannot tolerate contact with other human beings, and where the rest, when contact is unavoidable, clothe every part of the body except the face.
Baley is summoned to Solaria to solve another murder. A Spacer, Rikaine Delmarre, has been murdered. It is the first crime of violence on Solaria in two centuries, which is why an Earth police detective has been requested. It is also a classic "locked-room" murder mystery in a special science-fiction sense. In that aspect, too, The Naked Sun complements The Caves of Steel.

 
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