Asimov posits a technology that enables what Solarians call “viewing,” and his descriptions of that practice suggest a three-dimensional version of the screen-mediated forms of engagement (Zoom meetings and the like) on which people today increasingly depend. The people of Solaria, like those of plague-scarred Earth in the time of Covid-19, interact with other humans almost entirely by remote means.

To read this book during the 2020–2021 pandemic is to experience a shock of recognition-a glimpse of the present as foreshadowed by a decades-old vision of the future. But who could have administered it, and how? Like other Solarians, Gruer lives alone on a vast estate only his robots are able to come anywhere near him, and robots are hard-wired to avoid causing harm to their human masters. As the two detectives communicate via holographic projection with Hannis Gruer, the planet’s head of security, they watch him suddenly lurch into convulsions after sipping from a glass of water. Soon after Baley and Olivaw begin their probe, someone attempts a second murder. Elijah Baley, a “plainclothesman” from New York City, thus finds himself traveling millions of miles to a planet known for its “naked sun.” (In the Earth of this imagined future, people live in subterranean “caves of steel” and have no direct experience of the star that lights their galaxy.) There, Baley reunites with Daneel Olivaw, a “positronic” robot who served as his sidekick in the previous adventure. Faced with this quandary, the Solarian powers-that-be deign to invite a mere Earthman to work the case on their behalf. Evidence supplied by robots establishes that the only other human near that scene was the victim’s wife, Gladia, yet she fell unconscious around the time of the murder and had no chance to dispose of a weapon. Whoever killed Rikaine Delmarre bludgeoned him at close range, but no weapon turned up in the initial search of the crime scene. Peculiar facts about the killing raise the need for a serious inquiry.

Many centuries hence, a murder occurs on the Outer Worlds planet of Solaria, where crime is practically nonexistent-and so is any kind of police force. Asimov, in this sequel to another futuristic detective novel ( Caves of Steel), expertly combines those feats of literary alchemy into a lively, thought-provoking entertainment. Detective fiction goes a bit further by seeking to make significant that which is (seemingly) ordinary and to make clear that which is (temporarily) opaque. A defining quality of good fiction, and especially good science fiction, is that it makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar.

The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov