I’m not sure why it took me so long to get round to reading The Naked Sun when I had enjoyed the first novel so much. Daneel Olivaw (the ‘R.’ stands for ‘Robot’). But it took me until 2021 and lockdown to pick up the sequel, The Naked Sun, which sees American detective or ‘Plainclothesman’ Elijah Baley reunited with his robot sidekick from the planet Aurora, R. I read The Caves of Steel perhaps twenty years ago, when I first discovered Asimov’s work and devoured all of the Foundation novels plus quite a few of his short stories. In 1982, Asimov was persuaded to return to fiction, and added more novels to his best-known series, Foundation (which uses something akin to what we’d now call mathematical computer modelling to predict human behaviour on a mass scale), as well as two more Robot novels, The Robots of Dawn (1983) and Robots and Empire (1985). Asimov essentially gave up writing fiction in favour of non-fiction (which he acknowledged he much preferred writing) in 1958, the year after The Naked Sun appeared, with only a handful of works – including the Hugo- and Nebula-winning 1972 novel The Gods Themselves – being published over the next 24 years. First published in 1957, The Naked Sun is the second of Asimov’s four ‘Robot’ novels, following The Caves of Steel three years earlier. In Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun, social distancing – as we would now call it – is not just a useful ‘othering’ device to underscore the difference between Earth and another planet: it is an integral part of the novel’s plot.
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