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the feeling of enclosure that they cannot venture outside without feelings of agoraphobia. Meanwhile, earlier generations have colonized fifty nearby planets, and their descendants have changed into Spacers: long-lived, disease-free, dependent on robots, and in control of their birth processes in quality as well as quantity. Spacers differ in their social relationships and dependence on robots, but they are more like each other than like Earthmen, whom they detest and consider an inferior species. |
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In The Caves of Steel Baley must solve the murder of a Spacer before it is solved by a Spacer robot named R. Daneel Olivaw, who is assigned to Baley as a partner. In The Naked Sun Baley must solve the murder of a Spacer on Solaria, a planet that has carried reaction to Earth's crowded warrens to the opposite extreme: Solarians live on vast estates surrounded by robots, seldom come into personal contact with each other, and reproduce through laboratory techniques (even contact with spouses is not pleasant). On Solaria Baley's agoraphobia meets the Solarians' claustrophobia, and must cope with the planet's vast open spaces. There, also, Baley meets Gladia Delmarre, the beautiful wife of the victim, who turns out to be the unwitting instrument of her husband's death. Each feels an attraction for the other that neither can acknowledge. |
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The Robots of Dawn picks up where The Naked Sun leaves off. Baley has returned to Earth convinced that Earthmen must conquer their agoraphobia and colonize the Galaxy, as Han Fastolfe, Daneel's creator, had advocated in The Caves of Steel. The Spacers are too comfortable to endure the necessary hardships and too long-lived to risk their lives in such dangerous pursuits. Baley, at forty-five, is to old to go, he believes, but perhaps his son, Ben, will. As the novel opens, Baley and Ben and a small group of like-minded Earth people are practicing survival techniques in the open near New York when Baley receives an urgent summons. He must go to Aurora and solve a mystery. This time it is not a murder: a robot has been incapacitated, its mind totally destroyed by being placed into a condition called ''roblock." The question of what to call this crime receives considerable discussion in the early pages of the novel; it is not homicide, and the term roboticide is awkward. Eventually Baley calls it murder, because the robot is not just any mechanical creature; it has been manufactured by Fastolfe, the leading roboticist in the inhabited Galaxy, as a twin to Daneel. |
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Like the other mysteries Baley has solved, this one is a variety of the "locked-room puzzle" that Asimov enjoys (in his memoir he wrote, "[It] was essentially a murder mystery, and I am particularly comfortable |
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