The Caves of Steel Review

Isaac Asimov wrote over 400 books in his lifetime, and is known as one of America's most prolific authors. So, naturally, I was interested in reading some of the stuff he's written. Mostly everything by Isaac Asimov is science fiction, and are known as being genre-influencing, such as the 3 Laws of Robotics. I decided to start by reading Asimov's "Robot Series", which consist of 3 novels and a few short story collections. The first book in that series is the book that I am talking about today, The Caves of Steel. The Caves of Steel is a science fiction "whodunit" style story, which is a story about a murder where the murderer isn't revealed until the end. The novel follows Elijah Bailey, a detective tasked with solving a murder that took place in nearby Spacetown. For a little background, Spacetown is an Earth city created by the humans living on other planets. They are alienated from normal Earth humans, and utilize robots for everything, whereas most humans despise robots. After a murder occurs in Spacetown, a robotic partner is assigned to Elijah to help with the investigation. The rest of the story follows Elijah and his robotic partner (R. Daneel Olivaw) as they travel around the City and Spacetown searching for clues and attempting to solve the murder.

The book is fairly short, resolving in just about 260 pages (I read the mass market paperback version). One thing I enjoyed about this book is that it is self-contained. Although it is part of a series, the story holds up on its own and is completely separated from books 2 and 3 (save for the main characters). Overall I really enjoyed The Caves of Steel, and I recommend it for lovers of science fiction. I did however, find some issues within the book. It was short, so some of the scenes felt rushed, and it seemed like Elijah got his final reasonings almost out of nowhere. One minute he would be confused, and then shortly after he would be explaining some in depth theory about the murder. Another thing that I found annoying was that the reader could tell that any conclusion reached at the beginning of the story would be false, simply due to the nature of a whodunit style story.

In conclusion, The Caves of Steel definitely isn't perfect, but it was an enjoyable and interesting science fiction story that I would recommend to others.

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If you would like, you can donate this book to Ethan and Choco's Book Club, which is collecting books for cancer patients in hospitals. The amazon wish list can be found here. I would really appreciate it if you donated. Thanks!