Masterful diving in the heart of the future.

Isaac Asimov, Russian-born American writer, was an ardent devotee of science fiction. Much of its rich bibliography is thus focused on gender (very fashionable in the 50's also as much a literary point of view as a cinematic point of view). Nevertheless, it is nowadays remained particularly known and renowned for his fiction about robots. The Cycle of Robots and three laws of robotics thus he created almost overshadowed the rest of his works (added to the fact that certain books were adapted Cycle big screen, such Bicentennial Man or I Robot).

The Caves of Steel, written in 1953, takes place in this robotic odyssey. The story takes place in a suffocating framework: while the surface of the Earth is inhabited since the nuclear wars, the human race has sunk underground to live in gigantic megalopolis, real steel anthills who know nothing of a sunrise. Meanwhile, Spaciens, descendants of former landowners who colonized a part of the universe, has installed one of their cities on the edge of futuristic New York, that its inhabitants hardly bear. Added to this is a societal use of increasingly sophisticated robots, which, on the advice of former colonists, begin to replace some humans in their work. The revolt rumbles so, and it is in this explosive situation that a scientist is found murdered Spacetown ... The detective Elijah Baley must team up against her will with a robot Spacian to disentangle this murder troubling consequences that may be dramatic for the entire Earth.

From this clever story, Asimov gives us a detective story, which, while not unprecedented nowadays (but had to hold in breath readership 50s!), Lets follow with some pleasure.

However, where the writer unquestionably out and manages to captivate us brilliantly, it's a futuristic vision of Earth. Like the Jules Verne Paris in the Twentieth Century, it creates from scratch an icy future, which is far from most unrealistic. Treadmills, nuclear, robots and their three laws, space travel, overcrowding and synthetic meals are all plausible elements Asimov describes in great detail. Visionary, it offers a surprisingly consistent view of what could become the planet thousands of years. The universe of Steel Caves is searched and a future in every detail (especially for items for more or less tenuous changes in society), but still remarkably homogeneous a comprehensive and mythological point of view. Asimov unquestionably has a literary imaginative and extraordinary ability, that the French translation of his books unfortunately tends to restrict. The vocabulary, from American to French, loses precision and strength, sometimes within the scope of the joint where the original writings were offering innovative descriptions (as pointed out by one commentator, the "fields force "become" doors "). Shame and disgrace that the publisher and the translator did not transcribed with more finesse and accuracy of Asimov lines.

Let us add that the writer, through the metaphor of the robots, we offer a thinly disguised manifesto against racism and rejection of others and for equal rights.

So Caves of Steel is a book written with great intelligence, provided different reading beams, but especially written with a great passion for the future, offering us an extraordinary vision. A Must Read ... if possible in US!