{"id":150,"date":"2009-12-22T00:17:54","date_gmt":"2009-12-22T00:17:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=150"},"modified":"2012-02-27T14:21:51","modified_gmt":"2012-02-27T14:21:51","slug":"the-caves-of-steel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=150","title":{"rendered":"The Caves of Steel"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><em>The Caves of Steel<\/em> by Isaac Asimov<\/h3>\n<p>Nine people gathered at the Milwood Library for this   meeting. Our  topic was The Caves of Steel, a classic robot sf\/detective   novel.\u00a0 All  of us had read Asimov before.  We all started and finished  this book.<\/p>\n<p>Several of us liked the team of Elijah Bailey, the human   cop, with  R. Daneel Olivaw, a robot investigator. One person thought  Daneel   might have been the first robot cop depicted in fiction. They   eventually learn  to work together in the \u201cbuddy<!--more--> cop\u201d tradition.<\/p>\n<p>One reader had affection for the book. She found certain   scenes  were memorable. She didn\u2019t think the writing was wonderful, but  felt it   was a good story. She thought it read well within both the  mystery  and sf traditions.  The agoraphobic cave-dwellers seemed  realistic. And  she felt the attitudes  toward robots in this book were  eerily similar  to the attitudes aimed at  certain groups of humans in  the 50s.<\/p>\n<p>One person found the differences in protocols in men\u2019s and  women\u2019s restrooms were hysterical.<\/p>\n<p>A few noted Asimov\u2019s lack of vivid visual descriptions,  and  a poor  handling of female characters. Longtime readers informed us  that these   deficiencies in Asimov\u2019s writing had always been recognized,  even when  this  book was originally written.<\/p>\n<p>Several of us felt this book just did not hold up well.\u00a0  One reader  found the writing clunky, and felt  the future depicted in  this book  was too much like America in the 50s. Another  felt the  mystery was  unsophisticated.\u00a0  Yet another commented that it  particularly suffered  in comparison to the  writing of Sturgeon, whose <em>More than  Human<\/em> (from about the same time period) we read recently.<\/p>\n<p>Despite our some of our misgivings, overall we were glad  to  finally  read an Asimov book in our group. Near the end of the  meeting, we   talked about other robot books we\u2019d enjoyed and other  Asimov books  (both  fiction and nonfiction) that we liked. After the  meeting, many  of us had a nice  dinner at Mangia.<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8212;A. T. Campbell, III<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov Nine people gathered at the Milwood Library for this meeting. Our topic was The Caves of Steel, a classic robot sf\/detective novel.\u00a0 All of us had read Asimov before. We all started and finished this book. Several of us liked the team of Elijah Bailey, the human cop, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":530,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}