Trivia / The Caves of Steel

• Referenced by...:
  • The setting, plot and basic character dynamic were heavily Homaged in the anime Armitage III, which is unquestionably Cyberpunk. It just goes to show how foundational this book was to the genre.
  • In the Gunslinger Girl fanfics by Alfisti, Danilo Olivetti names his cyborg girl "C. Raych" in reference to R. Daneel. Those members of the Agency who understand the reference are not impressed.
• Science Marches On: Earth has become so overpopulated that almost all of the Earth's surface area must be converted to farmland, with the populace stuffed into overcrowded mega-cities where a socialist government carefully rations food, water, and resources and people are lucky if they have a sink of their own in their apartment. The total population of this teeming dystopia? Eight billion, which is only 200 million or so (give or take) short of the actual world population in 2020. The novel was written before the Green Revolution, which dramatically increased Earth's carrying capacity. Similarly, Earth has an economy that is based firmly in early-to-mid twentieth-century thought. At the time, strict, state-run economies seemed the wave of the future and quite inevitable. As more became known about the actual functionality of fascist and communist systems, that idea has fallen by the wayside.
  • It should be noted that Earth had, through careful Population Control, been hovering at roughly the same population level for about 3,000 years. Over such a long span of time, resource depletion would have become an issue, especially since the Spacers were prohibiting Earth from accessing resources from off-planet. Even more impressive once you consider that the City system has only become fully necessary three centuries ago.
• Technology Marches On: Some of the novel's technological predictions for the world circa 5000 A.D. can seem rather peculiar, even quaint, by present-day standards.
  • One character says that measuring blood glucose level requires a medical laboratory. Since the novel was written, cheap and portable blood glucose testing kits have become widely available.
  • Also Asimov incorrectly predicted what was going to be easy and hard for a computer to do. Cell phones and iPods are unknown in this world. Yet Daneel's positronic brain allows him to balance on two legs, understand the images his eyes are seeing, and speak natural language, all of which are really, really hard for a computer to do. Culturally, there was a significant difference in perception as to what a computer was as opposed to what a robot was when the novel was written. To a present-day person, a "robot" is simply a computer that can move in some way, not necessarily an Artificial Human. While it seems perfectly logical to us that something like Daneel's positronic brain would be just as effective if used in a stationary "computer" as it is in the body of an android, back then, the two technologies were imagined to be unrelated.
  • A key part of Fastolfe's plan is to encourage Earth to embrace a "C/Fe" society, with "C" (carbon) representing humans and "Fe" (iron) representing robots. By the late-20th Century, most real-world roboticists would have contended that "Si" (silicon) was a more crucial element in the creation of advanced electronics. Ironically, as of 2014, carbon is increasingly viewed as the future of advanced electronics, as well as structural materials. Meaning that a realistic future robot would also be a carbon-based "life form". Virtually no modern roboticists regard iron as a significant component of well-designed robots except for non-humanoid industrial automatons.
  • Daneel is shown to be impressed by the complexity of Earth computers... which use punch cards and mercury delay line memory.
  • The expert roboticist has an "e-book" version of the Robotics Handbook, which appears to be on microfilm, and he is proud of the indexing system he invented for it himself, since the original has no built-in search function. He also uses a slide-rule to do the math to check Daneel's responses to his tests.
  • The camera gear room at the police station uses photographic film that can be fogged by radiation, which is a plot point. Most police forensic photographers today use digital cameras.

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