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Wilkins in 1952. Asimov also had completed a non-fiction book on his own, first called The Puzzle of Life and then The Chemistry of Life. Two publishers had rejected it, but he knew now that he could write nonfiction, and another publisher had approached him to do a book about science for teenagers. |
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Asimov had gained confidence in worldly ways as well. He had been promoted to assistant professor at the Boston University School of Medicine at the end of 1951, and he was beginning to think of himself as a writer rather than the research chemist he had considered himself for the last dozen years. He had earned $1,695 from his writing in 1949, more than $4,700 in 1950, $3,625 in 1951, and "an astonishing" $8,550 in 1952, the last amount being half again as large as his university salary, now $5,500. He had $16,000 in the bank; he owned his own car; and he and his wife were thinking about buying a house. They had a son, two years old. |
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He had matured in other ways. His social insecurity, particularly with women, had eased with success, and he had adopted a good-humoredly "gallant" approach to all women of all ages. He had even enjoyed his first extra-marital encounter and felt he had acquitted himself well. |
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What novel was the focus of all these maturing influences? |
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The Caves of Steel is placed in a time about three thousand years in the future. Earth is a homogeneous society of eight billion people who live in Cities with populations of twenty million or more. The open country outside the Cities is given over to agriculture and mining, performed entirely by robots. Earthmen, as Asimov calls them, have worked out efficient systems of living and supplying the necessities of life and accommodating themselves to the pressures of everyday existence. On fifty other inhabited planets, however, live the Spacers, once settlers from Earth but now quite different from Earthmen: the Spacers have normal lifespans of up to 350 years, are free from infectious diseases, control their births not only in quantity but in quality, and, though few in number, are militarily powerful because they have many machines and robots and depend upon interstellar travel. Upon previous occasions they have sent down their "gleaming cruisers from outer space" into Washington, New York, and Moscow to collect what they claimed was theirs. They have constructed a "Spacetown" adjacent to New York. In Spacetown, a Spacer has been murdered. The plot revolves around the investigation of that murder by Elijah ("Lije") Baley, a detective on the New York City police force with a C-5 rating, who is forced by the Spacers to accept as a partner a humanoid robot, R. Daneel Olivaw. |
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The novel was based on an idea suggested by Horace Gold. Gold had |
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