Detective Daneel

Soarele gol

During the past four decades I have resisted all temptations to just sit down and read The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov. I've probably read it before, in bits and pieces, while standing and browsing in book stores. For this blog post, I read the version that was published in 1956 in Astounding Science Fiction.

Previously, in The Caves of Steel, Asimov had introduced Detective Baley and Daneel, a humanoid robot. In The Naked Sun, Baley and Daneel go to the planet Solaria and try to solve a murder mystery. Solaria is a world where robots do all the work and just a few humans live on large estates, each living in almost complete isolation from other people.

interior art for The Naked Sun

Plant a Seed
In The Naked Sun, Asimov introduces readers to a new character Gladia (see the first 3 illustrations on this page). Solarians seldom meet face-to-face, but they view other people by means of holographic images. Gladia is having her hair done by one of her robots when Baley calls to chat. She has not bothered to get dressed because this is "only viewing".

interior art by Henry Van Dongen

The Naked Gladia. As depicted previously in The Caves of Steel, Baley has lived his entire life indoors, inside one of the giant cities of Earth. When he views Gladia, there is a window behind her showing the outdoors, which is upsetting for Baley. An illustration (shown to the right) from Astounding shows what happens when Gladia stands up and tries to close the window blinds. Baley nearly falls out of his chair when Gladia's towel slips and her body goes on display. Sadly, since this was a 1956 publication, the illustration is rated PG.

interior art by Henry Van Dongen

I've never been able to convince myself that Asimov's imagined future for the planet Solaria has any chance of being possible. Asimov apparently liked being indoors (writing endlessly), but that does not mean that in the future Earth will be populated by people like Baley who never step outside. And at the other extreme, people are social creatures, so I doubt that a culture such as that imagined by Asimov for Solaria would be possible. However, readers can view the imaginary future society depicted in The Naked Sun as a kind of thought experiment and try to judge if Asimov has constructed a fun and amusing space age murder mystery.

interior art by Henry Van Dongen

Give me a hand
As a spoiled reader from 2020, the illustrations in Astounding for The Naked Sun do not seem very inspired. The klunky robotic servants drawn by Henry Van Dongen don't strike me as being the sort of devices that anyone would have as their household servants.

As a biology nerd, what I found most interesting in The Naked Sun is the genetic engineering that Asimov imagined to be taking place on the planet Solaria. Asimov suggested that the Solarians routinely analyzed every protein in every Solarian as part of a comprehensive human breeding projet. In 1953, the amino acid sequence of the insulin protein had been determined, so it was not unreasonable for Asimov to imagine a future time when complete proteome sequencing might become routine.

I like to watch. Interior art by Henry Van Dongen

For the Solarians, the next step was to select which pairs of Solarians should have sex and produce children. The sex part was a real weak link in the whole scheme. In the imaginary social world of Solaria, most of the Solarians hated the idea of physical contact with another person. However, it was the (unpleasant) duty of Solarians to have sex with their mate who had been selected by a genetic algorithm so as to produce the best offspring possible. Back on Earth, by 1959, some rabbits had been produced by in vitro fertilization. Had Asimov known how easy it is to do in vitro fertilization, I suspect he never would have use the plot that he wrote into The Naked Sun.

back to the future

After a Solarian woman becomes pregnant, the embryo is surgically removed from her body and gestated artificially. Defective embryos are eliminated and only healthy children are produced. The children who are "born" on Solaria are another big problem. Nobody on the planet wants to have anything to do with raising children. A special cadre of robots is assigned to that task. One particularly dicey problem is how to get a robot to discipline a child.

Three Laws
Asimov's imaginary positronic robots have built-in safety features: the three laws of robotics, the first of which is "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." However, in The Naked Sun, Asimov describes how robots on Solaria spank the children. The Solarian roboticists have weakened the first law, allowing robots to punish children "for their own good". The evil roboticist in the story is even planning to make robotic spaceships that will mistakenly believe that during a war they are only destroying other robotic spaceships, not spaceships containing humans from rival planets.

a red-shirted Solarian

 What the meaning of is "human" is
Solarian robots are also programmed with the prejudices of the Solarians and to treat Earthlings as inferiors. Asimov later came back to this idea in his 1986 novel Foundation and Earth. I love the idea of a writer who can pick up an old story idea after thirty years and run with it. In this case, the xenophobic Solarians have been quietly carrying out their human genetic engineering program for close to 50,000 years.

For me, I love what Asimov did in Foundation and Earth, uniting his Foundation and robot stories. It was fun for me to see the ancient origins of Fallom in The Naked Sun.

     Mystery

in the Ekcolir Reality

From my perspective, the biggest mystery of The Naked Sun is why Asimov made such little use of detective Daneel in this novel.🙁

After publishing The Naked Sun, Asimov entered into a new phase of his writing career during which he pretty much went out of the Sci Fi novel writing business, continued writing short Sci Fi stories and wrote many non-fiction books. Many of Asimov's non-fiction books were about physics, but in 1962 Asimov published a book about the genetic code and in 1963 he published The Human Brain. Asimov then published a novelization of Fantastic Voyage, so apparently someone thought he should still be writing novels. The Gods Themselves slipped out in 1972. Eventually, late in his life, Asimov did return to writing more science fiction novels, but he was taken from us too soon. I like to think that Asimov might have written another novel about Gladia's first years on Aurora and her relationship with Jander.

                                                            Psionics

whatever psionics is, that's entertainment

The second biggest mystery related to The Naked Sun is: why didn't Asimov publish another Gladia and Daneel novel like Robots of Dawn until 1983, 17 years after The Naked Sun? Yes, Asimov was plenty busy, still writing, but I have to wonder to what extent Asimov was pushed away from writing science fiction novels by his faltering relationship with John Campbell.

editorial, June 1956 Astounding

Campbell expected that the efforts of amateurs to launch a science of "psionics" would face problems similar to what early chemists ran into, for example, chasing after silly ideas like phlogiston. In the June 1956 issue, Campbell claimed that the readers of Astounding wanted the magazine to "run psionics articles".

Image from Campbell's psionics article, June 1956
 Astounding. Campbell warned readers to ignore
 mystics when investigating psionics; after-all, Jesus
had been unable to tell Peter how to walk on water.

Gullibility Detector
Campbell was trying to sell magazines and he wanted to entertain his nerdy audience. In that June issue, Campbell published a picture of a "Hieronymous Machine". Designed by Thomas Hieronymus, the device was claimed to detect a new form of radiation, "eloptic energy", some mysterious hybrid electrical-optical signal emitted by all material substances. While expressing doubts about Hieronymus' "theory", Campbell built a version of the "detector" and reported that it did seem to detect something.

                                                                                                      walking on water

source

Inspired by Asimov
I have a lot of fun in my Exode Saga writing about a character named "Thomas" who annoys Isaac Asimov by trying to get Asimov to read his crazy story about alien visitors to Earth. Also, in the Exode Saga, there are mysterious particles called "hierions" that can be used for sending telepathic signals. I'm not trying to mock Campbell or Hieronymus... I'm just trying to have fun imagining: what if some of Campbell's fantasies about psionics were true? I have the feeling that Asimov had no patience for Campbell's pseudo-scientific yearnings and that may have contributed to Asimov getting out of the Sci Fi novel publishing business for a while.

Review

Lucky for we readers, Asimov did eventually write some fun novels about Daneel and his telepathic powers.

Confidence

Related Reading: celebrating 100 years of Asimov

hikikomori- persistent avoidance of social situations 

Dianetics - another fake science scam provided to Astounding readers by Campbell 

Daneel - Asimov's telepathic puppet master of the all-human galaxy 

Related Reading: the Dean Drive

Next: the science fiction of neurobiophysics

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