Regular readers of this blog may have discerned that Science Fiction is not a genre I have any interest in. This was not always so - I was introduced to it in my early twenties and read a lot of it. In later years I've tended to run a mile from anything that sounds like SF, but joining a book club has been very good for taking me out of my comfort zone. A few months ago I read and very much enjoyed Ian McEwan's brilliant Machines Like Me, but I never thought I'd be going back to the early famous SF novels such as I'd enjoyed decades ago. Then came the book club choice of Asimov's The Naked Sun, at which point my heart sank. But I'm not a quitter. The novel is not available on Kindle, so I ordered a used copy, but the weeks went by (we meet once a month) and there was no sign of it. I'd given up on it when suddenly, the morning before we were due to meet, it finally appeared in my mail box. I had just over twenty-four hours to read it, and read it I did. And to my great delight and amazement, I enjoyed it enormously.
The Naked Sun came out in book form in 1957, but it was first published in serialised form in 1956, so I'm counting it as qualifying for the 1956 Club. It's the second novel in Asimov's Robot series, and, like its predecessor, features the detective Elijah Baley - yes, detective, for this is indeed a whodunnit. No wonder I enjoyed it so much. There's no indication as to when it is set, but the unspecified future time in which it takes place is one in which the human race has taken two diametrically opposite methods of survival. Elijah lives on earth, where humans have retreated underground and live their entire lives without seeing the sky or the sun. But the murder he has been assigned to investigate takes place on the far away planet Solaria. Here humans live what we call today a totally self-isolated existence. All the work is done by robots, and the only contact humans have with each other is for the purpose of breeding, though the newborns are taken away and raised in a scientifically controlled environment. Contact is normally carried out by what is called viewing - a rather sophisticated version of Zoom or Skype, in which the participants have a virtual experience of being in the same room. Occasional face to face interaction can take place if essential, but it's regarded as a dirty and upsetting experience.
Elijah is not new to robots, as for this task he is reunited with his partner from his previous case, robot R Daneel Olivaw. Unlike the Solarian robots, Daneel is a humanoid and thus indistinguishable from a human being, something which proves to be invaluable to the investigation. But Elijah has many difficulties to overcome in this unfamiliar world, not least the fact that he is exposed to the sun (the naked sun) for the first time in his life. Then, in the course of his attempts to find the murderer, he needs to meet the suspects face to face, which causes them all significant trauma. However, Elijah manages to form a face to face relationship with beautiful Gladia, who happens to be the prime suspect, as she was the wife of the victim and on her own in the house with him at the time of the murder. Also present, of course, was the house robot, but owing to the laws of robotics, he, or it, cannot be a suspect.
So, as you can see, this has all the ingredients of a classic locked-room mystery, but with the added pleasure of exploring a world which is simultaneously so alien from our own and so like - resonances with lockdown and our need to come to terms with a new reality are inescapable.
Amazingly, none of the other members of the book club enjoyed it nearly as much as I did - even the person who'd chosen it, having read it decades ago, said he was disappointed. I couldn't really see how this could be, but so it was. As for me, I shall be reading more of Asimov's Robot series. So overall an eye-opener. Hooray for book clubs in general and the 1956 club in particular..
