[Billed as the sequel to The Caves of Steel](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/1951s7u/the_caves_of_steel_1953_1st_book_of_the_elijah/), the story doesn’t heavily depend on the first as it has a very different plot. However, Baley and Olivaw are back in their roles investigating a homicide, and Asimov is expanding a bit more on the Robot series universe with this entry.
Again, Asimov has decided to look at some aspects of the socioeconomics of a co-existing human and robot society. In TCOS, Asimov hinted there was much more going on with spacers colonizing distant systems and starting anew. Asimov follows up on this concept in The Naked Sun, focusing on the clash of culture between humans on Earth and humans that have gone off colonizing the rest of space.
Unlike other golden age SF stories of this type at the time, Asimov’s colonies have not developed into planets and outposts covered in robot-built futuristic cities populated by humans and run by some overarching robotic mind. Instead, Asimov envisions a society on a colonized planet called Solaria that has fundamentally changed how humans co-exist, pressuring people to become more isolated as robots do nearly everything that needs to be done. Thus, a murder in such an isolated society would generate quite a mystery, and if we involve robots, then we get the complexity of an Asimov SF story.
Viewing is a holographic technology, a futuristic Skype for people to keep in contact with each other. People only have physical contact when a computer selects a man and a woman to live together. Also The Naked Sun has elements of eugenics, which is further expanded upon with technologies to achieve these utopic goals. It seems Asimov wants to explore that possibility here.
Again, like The Caves of Steel, we have a Scooby doo reveal, but it doesn’t stretch credulity as much as the first. There is still a problem with it, though. The trouble with The Naked Sun big reveal is that the solution is out of the blue and takes on answering a question tangent to the main storyline. Guessing it would be nearly impossible. The reader is just launched into this other realm of hypotheticals about the positronic brain and secrets that become several issues Asimov wants to discuss philosophically through his main character Elijah Bailey.
Asimov’s conclusions are either hit or miss here, but these are his opinions and story, so you can choose to select or reject it as some of his characters do. Aside from these issues Asimov wants to tackle, he also has a larger point about isolationism and isolationist policies. In that respect, he got a lot right, especially in an age where everyone is glued to their phones and not even noticing the world around them or the sun shining down on them.
by TheIrishLoaf