The Robots of Dawn

The Robots of Dawn is the third volume in the Robot series by Isaac Asimov

Written nearly thirty years after The Naked Sun this, the third volume in the Elijah Baley series, is one of Asimovs greatest accomplishments. His writing has matured a lot in those thirty years and he has, in countless robot stories, strengthened his grasp on what the three laws of robotics can give to a story. It's still a murder story and the main character is still Elijah Baley, but the much matured Asimov dares to tackle more subtle subjects than he could in his earlier books, where the subjects and characters tended to a bit extreme in their characteristics.

Where the locale of The Caves of Steel is the crowded mega-cites of earth and The Naked Sun takes place on the nearly empty world of Solaria, The Robots of Dawn takes place on the spacer world Aurora. Aurora is the first world colonised from Earth and as that the most developed and the most powerful. Earth need Aurora to help it against the rest of the spacer worlds and when the chief Earth supporter on Aurora stands accused of "killing" a humanoid robot, Baley is send to the rescue. The only problem is that he (the accused) freely admits that he was the only one with the know-how on how to kill the robot. If Baley fails, Earth will be closed off from the rest of the universe and left to rot.

The only problems I had with this book, was that I remembered who the murderer was before page fifty and that I (as always) found the solution to the murder, to be a bit unsatisfactory.