Issac Asimov’s Caliban
All the action takes place on the planet Hades (yes it is rather arid) in and around the city of Purgatory (and yes, these sort of place-names continue to crop up). Hades is in a life-or-death environment crisis that would make the worst predictions for terrestrial global warming look like a minor inconvenience. The inhabitants of Hades are members of a loose alliance of forty-nine (at one time fifty) planets known as “Spacers.” Spacers, initially being more advanced, left Earth early on as doomed and took their robots with them. The three laws are for Spacers all but sacred, and life without robots unthinkable. The Settlers left Earth later and had become more advanced in every area but one, robotics. Settlers have a righteous disdain for robots. Although neither side trust the other, the environmental crisis Hades finds itself in, has joined these two groups. The Spacers cannot be moved to avert their impending doom on their own, and Settlers are looking for new worlds to inhabit. There are also internal difficulties among the Spacers themselves, aggravated in large part to the intrusion of the Settlers. Players in each of these camps (including members of Leving’s own robotics lab) become suspects. As one might suppose, no crime scenario that Kresh spins out makes much sense.
Intertwined with the mystery is a serious critique of robots, or more specifically the Three Laws. The critique comes in two forms, in a couple of academic lectures. These lectures/essays are thought provoking and lively in and of themselves (and the ensuing riot the follows the second lecture is also entertaining). Part of the critique is that the three laws enslaves and degrades a class of intelligent beings (robots) in such a way that would not be tolerated in with anyone else. In so commodifying such beings, humans are themselves degraded. If you are hearing an essay on the evils of slavery for both slave and master, you would not be far off. The other line of argument is that dependence upon Three-Law robots is the cause for the decline of the Spacers. Here the lectures get into trouble. Asimov had several lines for the decline of the Spacers, robots being only a minor line of inquiry. Moreover, it is difficult to see why dependence as decline cannot equally be applied to the Settlers’ technology. Is an aircar piloted by a robot any more decedent than one that can practically fly itself?
More powerful than the lectures is how Allen portrays the society of Hades. It is a society where people do no work, can do nothing for themselves, create nothing of value, and where the citizens are so many monads, slowly spinning in their own windowless rooms; where robots not only do all the work, but do work for which there is no need and work that is beneath their dignity. Hades is a narcissistic society whose breeding ground is the absolute lack of anything that might impeded humans reaching their full potential.
As with any good detective story, Caliban has all the players racing for a final confrontation where the truth finally comes out, in this case by piercing deduction combined with a theatrical slight-of-hand on the part of Kresh and Donald. As one might hope, the solution to the crime dispenses with all the previous theories but still manages to fit the facts of the case. Allen provides everything the reader needs to finger the culprit, and the solution is both obvious and elegant in retrospect.
Since writing Caliban, Allen has gone on with two more books in this series, Hades and Utopia. It is perhaps for this reason that Allen ends Caliban with hopeful epilogue rather than one that presages the difficult and finally futile effort for Spacer society to survive.
Summing up: Recommend for those who have enjoyed the works of Issac Asimov and anyone who likes classic detective fiction, albeit in an Asimovian setting.
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