Customer Reviews

The Naked Sun

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

THE NAKED SUN is a witty little novel that is unmistakably a product of Isaac Asimov. Not just because of the ubiquitous robots, but because of the familiar themes that Asimov explored over the course of his decades-long career. On the surface, the novel is a science-fiction mystery story told in the author's usual enjoyable style. But by the time I reached the end of the book, I realized that Asimov had been doing something a little cleverer than his normal runaround, and upon reaching the conclusion, I immediately flipped back and started revisiting some of the earlier scenes to catch what I had missed the first time around.

THE NAKED SUN starts up where THE CAVES OF STEEL left off, although you certainly do not need to have read the earlier book to enjoy this one. Earthman Detective Elijah Baley is once again teamed up with R. (for Robot) Daneel Olivaw to solve an unexplained murder. The gimmick this time is that the homicide occurred on one of the mysterious Outer Worlds, and Baley must not only act as policeman, but as an unofficial spy for an Earth government curious as to what the culture is like on those advanced, robot-dependent planets.

The mystery is rather clever, although I did figure out what the murder weapon must have been before Baley did. As usual with Asimov's mysteries, I found myself enjoying the investigation more than the occasional plot logic that's thrown to the audience. In the case of this book, the storyline has some solid twists and turns, the only real flaw being that the cast of characters is so small that one could just pick a suspect at random to have a pretty good shot of correctly identifying the killer.

The real star of this story is the universe that Asimov builds. The Earth is still the lagging, suspicious and enclosed world of THE CAVES OF STEEL, but now we turn our attention out to one of the colony worlds, Solaria. I could tell that Asimov was having a blast creating this society, giving us all kinds of details such as this planet's frosty relationship with Earth, its delicate relationship with other Outer Worlds, its population levels, its staggeringly high ratio of robots to people, etc. But he has even more fun giving birth to the inhabitants. He has them still as recognizable humans, but from an extremely skewed perspective. For most of the book, it's the story of these strange people and their odd customs that overpowers what is currently going on in the murder investigation. This definitely makes for an interesting read, as once we get to the end, we find that the detective portions were only secondary to the real point of the book.

Often Asimov would insert little bits of social commentary into his fictions, with varying levels of success. And indeed, the summation at the end, where Baley lets the cat out of the bag and tells us what the novel has been exploring, is a little on the clumsy side. But the real triumph is how the author quietly and cunningly led us down the garden path to the end. When I opened the book to page one and found Elijah Baley nervously flying into a Washington, DC airport (by sheer coincidence I was making the same approach, albeit I started my journey in a different city than Baley had) and wishing to once again be safe indoors, I chucked to myself, recalling passages from Asimov's autobiography that discussed his legendary fear of flying and his mild claustrophilia. While reading all this stuff about people who hate flying, people who have an unnatural fear of face-to-face meetings, and people who yearn for enclosed spaces, I assumed that Asimov was doing nothing more than his usual shtick of inserting his own neuroses into his fictions (there's nothing wrong with this; it can make for very interesting reading, and it's something I particularly enjoy from Asimov). And with that assumption in place, I didn't pay much mind to what the author was actually setting up beneath the surface. So when the end of the novel rolled around and it was suddenly revealed what he had been up to this whole time, I was very pleasantly surprised.

I like pulpy books that work on more than one level, and THE NAKED SUN gives us a very clever look at human fears while also providing an entertaining murder mystery. No, the characters aren't terribly deep, but the plot is a fun one and the extra bit of world building that Asimov engages in raises this book up. I like to read Asimov novels while traveling, because I find them to be a nice relaxing way to pass a few hours. Anytime the good doctor can provide me with something even better and smarter than his usual high standard of amusing, whimsical adventures, I'm a very happy camper indeed.

The Naked Sun is the second book in Asimov's robot series and probably my favorite but all are worth reading. This book continues the futuristic Sherlockian adventure of Elijah Bailey and his straight-man robot sidekick Daneel Olivaw. This time they journey to the planet of Solaria to solve a murder that has political implications across the galaxy.

Asimov creates and socially interesting world in Solaria where people avoid human contact, live miles apart from each other and dependent upon robots to automate their society and keep their standard of living of high. Asimov deftly ties the intricacies of the Solarians into the mystery of the murder and ongoing multi book arc or robot progression. The whole thing is executed with Asimov's straightforward style and the character interaction and relationship between the two main characters is excellent as well.

I highly recommend this series to any science fiction fan as this is really top shelf sci-fi writing from the best. The series should be read in order though and one should start with the I, Robot short story collection before proceeding to The Caves of Steel (which is the predecessor to this novel). Also this series is entirely appropriate for any one of at least high school age.

Bottom Line: This series was revolutionary when it came out in the 50's. It's still one of the best ones out there.

The Naked Sun is the sequel to The Caves of Steel, and like that is a detective story set on the featuring robot-hating Plainclothesman Baley and, as if to prove Asimov really could predict the future, or movie-making of the '80s anyway, his entirely unsuited partner R Daneel Olivaw, a robot. Unlike CoS it's set on the (spacer) planet Solaria, a planet of few people and many, servile, robots.

I was a little disappointed after reading CoS, and was expecting something of the sort here, but that didn't happen. CoS was set on an Earth which I found awkwardly described - you got the impression Asimov was trying to say things about the way people thought but couldn't quite get them out. No such problem with The Naked Sun, where Baley's future-Earth foibles are out in the open (figuratively and literally), and Asimov also successfully hints for the first time that a utopia made up of a world where everything is done for you and where people can live for hundreds of years may, possibly, be flawed, a thesis that becomes stronger in "Robots of Dawn" and "Robots and Empire."

Asimov wrote that CoS was an attempt to answer a critic that it was impossible to combine the genres of science fiction with detective stories. The Naked Sun is much more than an answer to that challenge, it's one of Asimov's earliest studies of humanity, and it's a well written thoroughly readable one at that.

This is the second book in the Baley-Daneel duo. And it's better than the first one, The Caves of Steel. The Science Fiction aspect is more creative--the Solarians are unlike any race I'm seen or read. The mystery is even tougher. Looking at the two books, The Naked Sun is almost the opposite of The Caves of Steel. The latter takes place in a confined Earth, with few robots. The former is on Solaria, a world with many robots and open spaces. Baley's reaction to the expierence rings true to his character--especially when dealing with the open spaces. To sum up, this is sequel will hook you and make you crave more. How fortunate there is a book called The Robots of Dawn!

A thousand years earlier, mankind had split into two groups who now hated one another with a visceral prejudice born out of fear and a complete lack of cultural understanding of one another. Spacers, those who had seen their destiny in the stars, left earth with the assistance of positronic robot technology and colonized fifty worlds scattered throughout the galaxy. One world in particular, Solaria, was so thinly populated that the inhabitants had simply evolved away from the habit of personal contact. Birth was strictly controlled as a means of population replacement and achieved only through artificial insemination; child rearing was managed with the assistance of robots; communication, when it was deemed necessary at all, was via 3D holographic imagery; and personal contact of any kind, let alone sexual, was considered abhorrent. The taboo was so deep-seated it was capable of provoking nausea if the topic was frivolously mentioned.

So when a leading scientist was bludgeoned to death, the citizens of Solaria were quite incapable of even imagining that anyone other than the scientist's spouse was guilty. But since it had also been determined that she had no weapon, the only possibility that remained was that he had been killed by his own robots, a possibility that, of course, was absolutely impossible because of the three laws of robotics that governed all human-robot interaction. Solaria had no choice but to ask for Earth's assistance in solving the problem. Only an Earth detective would have the intuitive understanding of interpersonal relationships and what would prompt someone (or perhaps a robot?) to violence and murder. And it was well known from his recent performance solving the murder in "The Caves of Steel" that Detective Elijah Baley was the only detective who could stomach prolonged contact with Spacers and Robots. So Elijah Baley was on his way to the scene of the crime on Solaria.

What an incredible novel!

Asimov outdoes Agatha Christie herself in concocting a compelling futuristic version of the impossible "locked room" mystery whose solution is based on an understanding of the profound differences of three imagined but superbly developed cultures - two human and one robot - all of which respond in profoundly different ways to the same stimulus. He takes a page from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's brief and has his detective quote the famous aphorism about the solution, however improbable, being all that is left after one has eliminated the impossible. Asimov takes his obvious admiration of Doyle's work one step further allowing Baley to emulate Sherlock Holmes' personal vision of justice by indulging in a debate over the distinction between legal guilt and moral guilt and how the consequences for the two ought to be quite different. And, of course, in the tried and true fashion of cozy mystery detectives ever since the first cozy mystery was written, all is revealed in a showdown drawing room setting with the master confronting all of the possible culprits as he reveals his subtle chain of logic and the now obvious solution.

But only a master of the sci-fi genre of the caliber of Isaac Asimov could turn what might have been a mere 200 page murder mystery into a deeply moving philosophical essay on his imaginings for the future and survival of humankind and even what it means to be human.

Highly recommended indeed for all lovers of science fiction, classic or contemporary.

Paul Weiss

While "The Caves of Steel" gets my vote as "The Best Asimov Book of All-Time", this one comes in a close second place. I sure would have liked for Asimov to expand a bit more on the world from "The Caves of Steel", but he does a great job here as well, in presenting the different culture found on the Spacer world... someone HAS to make a movie out of the Robot Murder books.

Like all of Asimov's best works, this novel is a tight exploration into how humans operate. He contrasts humans both with robots and with aliens in the work, and though humans have the lower hand here, he offers hope for the future. The book happens to be a well-crafted mystery as well, just as it happens to be science fiction. Good science fiction posits humans in exotic locales doing ultimately familiar things. The fear of Elijah Bailey is a bit odd, since it is of open spaces and sunlight, but we all fear things, and Asimov gets to the heart of what fear is and how it can--and in the humans' situation in the novel--must be overcome. It is an extremely satisfying book, as most mystery novels are not.

The late Isaac Asimov is one of my all-time favorite sci-fi writers. He was one of the old "hard sci-fi" school that populated the `50s and a successful member of that community by the way.

This story is the second step in the long friendship between the earthling New York detective Elijah Baley and the robot detective R. Daneel Olivaw. You don't need to read "The Caves of Steel" to understand this one, it is almost a stand alone book.

Situated in a far future Earth, Humankind has divided into Spacers who dwell scattered in fifty worlds (and are the rich & advanced society) and Earthlings that remain in the Mother World, inhabiting overcrowded underground cities. Both groups distrust and despise each other.
A murder occurred in Solaria an Outer World. Elijah is put in charge of the investigation due to his success in the previous investigation.
Once again he will team with R. Daneel.
Here different phobias interact conditioning the development of the events.
Bailey is terrorized to be outside of he caves. From that fact derives the title of the novel as the Naked Sun is almost unbearable to stand for him.
The Solarians avoid direct contact with other humans. They interact thru holographic system and are surrounded and served by robots that do not look like humans.
Imagine in this context how a crime is possible. Well that is the task of our heroes.

On this background Asimov, once again, construct a many layered novel. At one level is a classical detective's story at another one a study on alien cultures interacting. In yet another level is psychological approach to phobias.
In a classical Asimovan way, each chapter introduces new elements and characters to the action until at last everything squares to a satisfactory ending.

Both partners will continue their adventures and mystery solving in "Robots of Dawn". R. Daneel will resurface at the closing volumes of the "Foundation" saga.

Enjoy one of Asimov's earlier works!
Reviewed by Max Yofre.

The only reason I've rated this book only four stars is because some of Asimov's later books in the same series, written later in his career (e.g., Robots of Dawn) get even better. I found that there was a linear improvement in Asimov's writing through all of the robot novels.

Not only do you get to experience a great mystery-adventure, but you're also exploring the social consequences of near-human robots and the continued urbanization of the Earth along with man's push into space.

Daneel Olivaw, the robot partner to detective Elijah Baley, is one of the most memorable characters in the field of speculative fiction.

This is the best place to start reading Asimov; however, you should begin by reading the first novel in the series, Caves of Steel. If you enjoy these two, you will absolutely love the sequels. After reading the Robots books, try the Foundation series, which starts slower but gets very good--and ultimately rewards readers of the Robot books by tieing it all together.

"The Naked Sun" is the second in a magnificent continuation to an awesome science fiction series involving Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw. The Solarian's, descendants of Earth, ask the agoraphobic (afraid of open places) plainclothes cop Elijah Baley, since he solved a previous Spacer murder, to unravel a crime committed on their planet. With little choice, he embarks across space to face not only a foreign environment but also a robot-infested society. The robot intolerance Elijah is partnered with technological masterpiece Daneel to break the case before it is too late. Daneel continues to learn about human behavior from Elijah and is restricted in his behavior by what is known as the Law of Robotics. The story moves at a good tempo with an astonishing conclusion.

Thank you.