The Caves Of Steel
The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov ๐
This was a childhood favorite of mine, I hadn’t revisited in probably 25 or 30 years but I still remembered the mystery! It holds up better than I expected. Asimov gets a bad rap for his character writing, and certainly they serve the plot more than the other way around, but now that I’m not literally a child I am surprised to find I relate to Asimov characters a lot more, since many of them are motivated by things like maintaining their workplace reputation or getting new stuff for their apartment or hating their colleagues or whatever.
This book is genuinely pretty funny when it is parodying dramatic whodunit reveals, and clever in how it presents Elijah as our audience stand-in POV character, and then gradually reveals that as a New Yorker from the year 5000-something he is at least as alien to us as the robots or the Spacers.
This story also serves as an aspirational fantasy: though cars exist for special circumstances, nearly all human transportation is done by foot.