The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov

Having reread this novel for the first time in decades- this time having actually having read Caves of Steel first- I've concluded that it's good, very very good. In fact, I'm pondering on the possibility that the two novels taken together may be Asimov's masterpiece. Then again you could argue that about Foundation. In both cases, it's all about the ideas, and the ideas are profound.

Like its prequel, this is a whodunit set in a future with an overcrowded Earth and robot-obsessed colonists, "Spacers" who lord it over the old homeworld, with complex and intriguing sociological undercurrents.These's a bit of an emphasis on the Laws of Robotics, but the ideas in play here far bigger than merely those.

Oh, the novel dates in places. In the future, everyone smokes, at least on Earth. Gendeer roles are very '50s. It's taken as axiomatic and universal that children are to be disciplined by physical force. Most amusingly, sex is rationed on Solaria in order to control the population, in a serialised novel written just three years before the advent of the contraception pill.

Yet there's so much to explore here. Ideas of decadence through technology slowly giving us lives of ease, something which, I think, in 2023, is very far off. Yet Solaria, though an extreme example, is a cautionary tale of what happens if we put too much of our social life into virtual channels rather than face to face, which since Covid we've all done to such extent, with a certain amount of our social skills beginning to atrophy.

This is a work of genius, both as a whodunit and with its conclusions on the future of the society it depicts.