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factories, the hydroponic plants, the yeast-culture vats, the power plants. Through all the melee were the water pipes and sewage ducts, schools, prisons and shops, power lines and communication beams. |
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There was no doubt about it: the City was the culmination of man's mastery over the environment. Not space travel, not the fifty colonized worlds that were now so haughtily independent, but the City. . . . |
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The Cities were good. |
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The techniques that science-fiction writers had been developing to fictionalize issues, to dramatize future societies in the process of telling the story, were tools that had been invented and perfected and that lay at hand for anyone capable of using them. The Kuttners, Henry and C. L. Moore, had used them well in the early and mid-1940s, Heinlein had mastered them, A. E. van Vogt had adapted them to his own magical purposes, and Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth were beginning to bring them to the purposes of satire. But Asimov, who had participated in their development, displayed his skill in their use particularly well in the robot novels. |
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He provided a host of corroborating details, both psychological and social. Codes of behavior have developed naturally around the major institutions of the Cities. The Personals, for instance, centralize bathroom facilities except for the occasional "activated" washbowl, such as Baley has in his "spacious" three-room apartment. So "by strong custom men disregarded one another's presence entirely either within or just outside the Personals," though women used them for social purposes. The "bright cheerfulness'' of the Personals contrasts with the "busy utilitarianism" of the rest of the City. The moving strips of roadway, the expressway and the localways, are places where behavior has become traditional and where juveniles break the traditions and the laws by playing on them such dangerous follow-the-leader games as "running the strips." Ways of behaving in the communal kitchens have become standardized to avoid annoying others and allowing others to annoy you ("the first problem of living is to minimize friction with the crowds that surround you on all sides"). "When you're young, mealtimes are the bright spot of the day," but "there is no one so uncomfortable . . . as the man eating out-of-Section" and "be it ever so humble . . . there's no place like home-kitchen." It might be noted that the novel contains a concern with food and persistent scenes of eating seldom found in Asimov fiction. Baley, for instance, is constantly worried about missing meals, and he is constantly eating, once in company with Daneel. The flavor and texture of the food is specified in significant detail, which, of course, reinforces the obsessional qualities of subsistence living. |
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