Isaac Asimov

If steel vaults, Asimov showed us a society agoraphobic, crowded, cloistered in the womb in which land had become megacities, when he wrote The Naked Sun, his then goes to the opposite extreme.

It is possible that Asimov's idea to go spend visiting each of the former colonies land (or at least, the most important) and to chart a dissection of them, using Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw as a focus around which to tie his story. And is that the tool has chosen to give literary form that social analysis can not be more correct: the novel.

Asimov's funny because it will always be a supporter of the classic detective (which is often called "problem novel, whose main crops are English) than the most American aspect of the genre, the thriller. For Asimov's all a puzzle, a logical problem to be solved, and the detectives (human and robot) they follow the tracks, deducing from the evidence in your mind and building a logical structure to solve the case. At that point, the police asimoviano could not be more classic.

However, it does have points of contact with the American thriller. It is precisely in all the burden it involves analysis and critique of the society in which they live. The crime novel is a distorting mirror (for all you have to exaggeration, incision in the most black and dark, the concentration of events in a small group of characters over a compressed time period) of the world where you live . And somehow the police asimoviano science fiction does so. By taking certain human tendencies, taking them to their ultimate consequences and introduce such a crime scene and an investigator (foreign and alien at the same time as investigating, distant and close to both events) Asimov's doing, probably without trying, thriller.

As we say, its structure must be more than Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, in that respect, The Naked Sun is a classic example police. The tracks you are giving the reader and the researcher tries to reconstruct what happened from them. As he did in The Caves of Steel, Baley and again launched into the air and hypotheses, each time the check actually down, rebuilt and transformed, in search of one that finally explains all the facts. All these signs are obvious, the reader may view as seen by the detective and, if smart enough, you can find the solution before it does. In that regard, once again, Asimov is exemplary in its honesty: things fit as they should, the solution to the enigma is consistent with this and at no time are traps and rabbits pulled out of the hat at the last minute. When Baley solves the crime, we know that is the truth and it was there before our eyes almost from the first page.

* * *

The society described in the novel, on the other hand, has a tendency to end the isolation of the others who, at the time in which Asimov wrote The Naked Sun, he was just an embryo, but is now clearly visible in some of the most technologically advanced human societies. Cases like that of Japan, with those teenagers who never leave home and live their lives "virtually" no physical contact with reality, may come to mind for everyone.

Solaria, the planet where the action takes place, is a world populated by little more than twenty thousand humans who have several million service robots. A place where every man lives in isolation, minimal social interaction and communication are never face to face. A society of misanthropes, in a way.

In that environment, sex is something unpleasantly necessary and professions such as doctor, geneticist or teacher is seen as a punishment. Physical contact is, by definition, dislike. And, of course, when a person discovers that the intimacy he pleases, that touching other humans is pleasant, it is seen as a degenerate. It's a totally dysfunctional society that tries to start from childhood of humans and their natural tendencies, not content with repressing, aspires to one day disappear.

A social experiment, in a way.

Has reached different levels of development. Some people can tolerate the presence of other human beings, while not getting too close. For others, however, the very idea that someone is in the same room, breathing the same air is unbearable. In fact, Asimov masterfully describes a meeting between Baley and the only psychologist who has the planet and where it passes, a forced acceptance of the presence of another human, to flight and complete isolation in little more than a few minutes.

That scene is, oddly enough, inspired by reality. Asimov describes the character at that time is based on Horace L. Gold, which we have already spoken, and the story itself that counts is very similar to a real story with the editor of Galaxy who, in the middle of a conversation with Asimov, apologized, went to the next room and from there unable to share the space with another person, Asimov called the phone and continued the conversation as if nothing had happened.

In this environment the presence of someone like Gladia Delmarre (a person with impulses "normal" from our point of view) becomes an aberration. Baley does not take long to realize that no impulses Gladia Solarians characteristic and, in fact, attracted to him. And what would be normal on Earth becomes a vicious and degenerate behavior in the cold Solarian society.

The dissection of the different characters that we see throughout the novel ends by drawing a profoundly sick society that in some ways, is so locked in her uterus as is the land of steel vaults. The two companies are extreme and, in some way through opposing methods have reached the same place.

* * *

The novel shares, of course, several features with Caves of Steel. The relationship between Baley and his robot partner, R. Daneel, is where we left there and taking shape a little more. The various characters who will appear in the plot, on the other hand, have their psychological archetypes that, but the author provides them with sufficient personal tics that seem real.

Although undoubtedly the dominant characters of the novel are Baley and Daneel (in a violation of the unwritten rules of the American detective story where the detective is the driver of the plot but it should be the protagonist), and in lesser extent, Gladia. The three form a sort of strange love triangle that Asimov, several years later, will explore in more detail in The Robots of Dawn.

The Naked Sun is a perfectly structured and impeccably novel measure. Have against the use of the characters and scene of another, making it that often, it is not seen as the great novel it is. Caves of Steel and The End of Eternity have the advantage of settings, characters and new situations, but The Naked Sun does not detract from them at all.

And indeed, like a pebble in the sky, stardust and space currents make up a thematic trilogy (analyzing three situations of oppression of one company by another) with Caves of Steel, The End of Eternity and The Naked Sun does the same, this time dissecting three dysfunctional societies that lead to its ultimate conclusion certain human tendencies.

Asimov reached here, no doubt, his big moment as a narrator. His science fiction has evolved gradually from the pulp clichés, to become an effective tool of analysis, reflection and speculation. While narrating how they were going and becoming more effective debugging, so does the way in tackling the ideas, conflicts and their resolution.

It is tempting to speculate on what would have happened if Asimov had not left that way, if he continued to write science fiction as a main activity. I often wonder how they would have been novels that Asimov did not write in the sixties and how much could have followed the wake of the new wave appeared at that time.

Fortunately or unfortunately, things went in another direction. The period from 1954 to 1957 is undoubtedly the top in Asimov's career as an author of science fiction. Reaches maturity as a storyteller and gives us his best work. Since then, production will decline and gender, in fact, does not return to write a science fiction novel itself entirely to the early seventies.

It will take more than twenty years until you seriously and principally to the novel. And when it does, time will be paid their bills. Something has been lost between the Asimov of the fifties and the eighties (though some have won also, as we shall see) and it never recovered.

REFERENCES:

• The Naked Sun (The naked sun). Doubleday, 1957. Most recent Spanish edition: Debolsillo, 2005.