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of free will. They are the products of civilization, however, and not much more than ten thousand years old. |
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The adjustment of sleep to night, however, is as old as man: a million years. The habit is not easy to give up. Although the evening is unseen, apartment lights dim as the hours of darkness pass and the City's pulse sinks. Though no one can tell noon from midnight by any cosmic phenomenon along the enclosed avenues of the City, mankind follows the mute partitionings of the hour hand. |
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The expressways empty, the noise of life sinks, the moving mob among the colossal alleys melts away; New York City lies in Earth's unnoticed shadow, and its population sleeps. |
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The prose of that observation, it might be noted, need not be ashamed anywhere in literary society. |
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Ultimately, the appeal of The Caves of Steel depends upon two major elements: the depiction of an overpopulated society living in what we would consider a claustrophobic environment, and the relationship between an Earthman and a robot. Asimov tries to get the reader interested in the Sarton-Fastolfe goal of pushing Earthmen into space colonization, but because this goal is distant and idealistic, the reader remains unconvinced. And the threat of robots replacing humans matters only insofar as it motivates Baley. |
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The environment, on the other hand, is virtually a major character in the novel. Some readers interpret The Caves of Steel as dystopian. Asimov refers to this in a headnote to "It's Such a Beautiful Day," a story reprinted in Nightfall and Other Stories: |
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I wrote a novel in 1953 which pictured a world in which everyone lived in underground cities, comfortably enclosed away from the open air. |
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People would say, "How could you imagine such a nightmarish situation?" |
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And I would answer in astonishment, "What nightmarish situation?" |
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The Caves of Steel was written by a claustrophiliac (and an agoraphobe) for an editor who had a severe case of agoraphobia. Asimov's dislike for travel and his refusal to fly are well known, but he also enjoyed being enclosed. In that same headnote he wrote: |
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. . . my idea of a pleasant time is to go up to my attic, sit at my electric typewriter . . . and bang away, watching the words take shape like magic before my eyes. To minimize distractions, I keep the window-shades down at all times and work exclusively by artificial light. |
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