Thread: The Caves of Steel, by Isaac Asimov

Throughout most of my childhood I was a pretty big SF fan, and back then Isaac Asimov was one of my favorite writers. When I started reading SF back in the late 1970's in Washington D.C. it was not easy to find many of his books, but one day my dad took me to a used book shop and I convinced him to buy me a pile of beat-up old paperback Asimov novels. I am pretty sure that The Caves of Steel was among those books, so it would probably have been around 1979 or 1980 that I first read it. I remember being a little shocked at the time. As a boy I was incapable of expressing my feelings about the book the way that I am now, but I remember being a little frightened by the imagery of this story. But I also remember loving it. To this day The Caves of Steel is the only book I have ever reread immediately, right after the first time I finished it. I know that I tend to be hard on Asimov; just take a look at the other reviews that I have published here about his books. I am forever knocking him for his sense of gallantry, his overblown syntax, and his tendency towards mind-numbing detail, especially when it comes to logical deduction and argumentation. This book certainly has those things in it. I honestly do not think it would be an Asimov book without them, but everything else about this book is incredible, even if as I sit here in 2009 some of the concepts are so dulled by time that I typically read over them without even noticing when they appear in modern stories...Please click here, or on the book cover above, to be taken to the complete review..