So the word is coming down that there might be a movie version of Isaac Asimov’s novel The Caves of Steel.

I would probably have been excited to hear that, say, oh, maybe 40 years ago, when there was a chance, a slim one, but still a chance, that there might be a reasonably faithful adaptation of the novel, with the only changes needed to convert it from a text based story to a visually oriented one.

And of course, the Good Doctor would still have been around to act as a consultant, if he wanted to, although he probably wouldn’t have, given his experiences with Hollywood.

But after seeing what has happened to the adaptation of Asimov’s Foundation stories, I’m not nearly as excited. I don’t hate the Apple TV+ version of Foundation, but I don’t love it either; it has it’s good and bad points, but it’s only tangentially related to the Asimov stories.

The adaptation is being done by John Ridley, who won an Oscar for 12 Years a Slave, and Cheo Hodari Coker of Netflix’s Luke Cage, with Ridley set to direct. It’s only been announced at this point, so it may not come to fruition.

The Caves of Steel is the first of Asimov’s robot novels (he had previously written only short stories involving robots) and it’s widely credited as being the first true blending of science fiction with a detective novel, as it’s a genuine whodunit pretty much in the mold of Agatha Christie, it just takes place several hundred years in our future, where the cities have become large and sprawling and are now covered by huge domes, hence the title. 

The story revolves around New York City police detective Elijah Baley who is reluctantly paired with a robot R. Daneel Olivaw to solve the murder of a Spacer scientist, which looks very much like a hate crime, as the Spacers, the humans who have colonized other planets, are regarded with deep suspicion by the inhabitants of the caves of steel. Oh, hell. The Earthlings hate the Spacers and vice versa, for no very good reasons other than humans seem to always group themselves into tribes that hate other tribes.

Asimov wrote this in the early 50s and perhaps you can see the point he was making then and how it might continue to resonate to today.

I don’t know how faithful the adaptation will be, of course, but in the novel there is trouble in Baley’s marriage and Asimov makes use of some interesting biblical references as he works out that sub-plot. In fact Asimov develops the background of his future society in great detail, even to the extent of how differently men and women behave in public restrooms, and I doubt that a movie will be able to incorporate very much of that detail; it would require a mini-series to do it justice.

That’s assuming, of course, that they don’t just toss out everything but the title and come up with their own silly and probably inferior plot, which is what Hollywood does 99% of the time. I hope they paid Asimov’s heirs well for the rights.

By the way, when as teenagers we made that phone call to Isaac Asimov back in 1966 and we unexpectedly got through to the Good Doctor and I found myself actually talking to him and I had to improvise a question which I had not had the forethought to prepare ahead of time because I never thought we would actually get through to him, this is one of the books that I asked if he was ever going to write a sequel to. Well, this and its sequel The Naked Sun. 

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