The Caves of Steel

Asimov, Isaac. "The Caves of Steel." Galaxy Oct., Nov., Dec. 1953. Rpt. as novel Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954. Frequently rpt., including Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1972. Sequel: The Naked Sun.

A human protagonist partnered with a robot detective solves a murder. Note hive-cities (our term) with bureaucratized Earthfolk afraid of the open air and too timid to go to the stars to solve the problem of overpopulation. Discussed in ch. 5, "The Robot Novels," in J. Gunn, Isaac Asimov; see also the essay by M. Moore—both under Literary Criticism. See below in this section, IA's Naked Su; cf. E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" and A. C. Clarke's The City and the Stars (cited in this section).