I first read The Caves of Steel over ten years ago. What always stuck with me was the depiction of New York as a capital-c City: an enclosed system stretching from Long Island to Trenton. Linking it all together is the Expressway, an interlocking set of moving conveyors which let you accellerate from stationary to 60 miles per hour without any vehicles or traffic.

That specific innovation featured less prominently during my re-read. I noticed more of Asimov’s postwar Malthusian philosophy: yeast vats and superdense communal living is the only thing keeping humans on Earth out of starvation as the population approaches 10 billion.

Our world today with over 8 billion people still looks much less centralized than Asimov envisioned. Calories are generally more abundant than he depicted in The Caves of Steel.

Of course, the other side of the novel is Earth’s forced integration of robots into its society by its former colony worlds. There’s anxiety around job loss that comes with automation, but I didn’t come away feeling like Asimov was particularly prescient on artificial intelligence here.

Overall I think I prefer the space opera of Foundation to the noir-adjacent story in this book. I’m happy I revisited it, but I don’t think I’ll be continuing on with the trilogy.