Caves of steel in six sentences: A cop is assigned a robot for a companion. They attempt to crack a murder case in "space town". The cop goes down a lot of false paths, manifesting his robot prejudice. Eventually he helps crack the case. The robot was not able to identify the culprit because his brain analysis did not reveal the guilt. However, the human realized an accidental killing would not manifest the guilt.
Caves of Steel in six words: Human outsmarts robot, solves Turing test.
Caves of Steel is OK as a mystery and OK as science fiction.
I wonder if this was one of the things I read in my youth. I remember reading a lot of Asimov, but not reading the foundation books. There must be some good stuff out there. However, it seems a lot of this is merely ok.
Isaac Asimov's first two books in the robot series were palatable sci-fi mysteries. Robots of Dawn is not. It comes across as the unedited musings of a lecherous old man. It is much longer than the other robot books, and filled with too much of Asimov's sociological musings. Plot and characters, are, alas tough to find. It does, however, have a nice sounding title.
Ok, it has been a long time since I read this book. (Nine months can put a dent on an initial reaction.) It is a detective story set in a science fiction future with robots. The key to solving it is figuring out the loopholes in the laws of robotics. It is not a bad story, but not a great one either.
