The Caves of Steel

Asimov's The Caves of Steel is a somewhat predictable murder mystery set in a future overpopulated Earth. The New York City of this novel is one of many Cities, vast urban expanses where most of humanity lives entirely regimented and strictly controlled lives in order to centralize production and consumption. The overpopulated Earth has created a new reigning ideology (civism) after a disastrous war with the Spacers, the descendants of human colonists who live on other planets. Unlike our protagonist Elijah Baley and the people of Earth, the Spacers live in underpopulated societies which protect individualism. However, the future of the human race is imperiled by the fragility of the overpopulated Earth, whose political and economic systems could collapse at any moment. Like the human homeworld, the colonies of the Spacers are seen as too stable and lacking the kinds of social cohesion and desire to expand colonization of the Galaxy. 

However, a fusion of the two types of human civilization, along with robot technology and labor (represented by C/Fe, a union of carbon and iron to symbolize human and robot society) could ensure the fate of humanity by expanding colonization through Earth emigration and issuing new social formations that combine elements of the corporate social bonds and solidarity of Earth with robots and pioneer spirit of the Spacers. Unfortunately for the long-held dreams of some Spacers, the murder of a prominent Spacer threatens this future. A human detective who shares the Earthmen's disdain for robots finds himself forced to solve the crime with the aid of an advanced (and humanoid) robot detective, Daneel Olivaw. The case takes our heroes across the vast sprawl of the City, its discontented Earthmen, the conspiracies of Medievalists (those who are calling for a return to the soil and ways of life that are closer to the 20th century than the dystopic future), and the prejudices and beliefs of Baley himself. 

While the ultimate mystery of who killed Dr. Sarton is, after a few plot twists, somewhat predictable, the tale of this overpopulated New York and the problematic fate of humanity reminds us at the blog of the then-current Cold War. The conflict between Spacers and Earthlings and their divergent ideologies almost sounds like Cold War conflicts between the US and the USSR. That a possible solution to the great problems of modernity could be found in a synthesis of the two civilizations may have appealed to writers like Asimov, who, as a rationalist, may have seen the path forward with both the embrace of reason, technology, and communalist aspirations, and a binding ethical vision. That could explain the numerous references to the Bible throughout the text, especially Elijah, Jezebel, and Jesus Christ.