Storyline: 2/5 
 Characters: 4/5 
 Writing Style: 3/5 
 World: 5/5 
 I don't like mystery novels. I really do like dystopian ones. I had no idea when I started that this was a murder mystery set in a dystopian future. 
 I think that even if I had liked detective storylines, that I would have found this a poor story. Was it that Asimov didn't care for the plot himself or is he just really bad at storytelling? Whichever it might be, he had to put something there in order to showcase his robots and his vision of the future. Thus the storyline was about the quality of a penny dreadful, and I never cared that much for how it resolved. 
 Now, the dystopia..... Jehoshaphat! That was astounding! This was a fascinating picture of the future. Some of the elements such as the Malthusian crisis and the technological gadgetry were obviously dated. Some of the other ideas - civism, for instance - oh my! Insightful and substantive. "The Cities" were a great projection of the trend of distancing ourselves from nature and the pursuit of efficiency. There was also a real warning in the idea of the "Caves of Steel." The significance of class was less stated though still a valuable bit in Asimov's future. I suspect the Spacer versus Earthman tensions were both a comment on existing racial tensions as well as a thought experiment into how labor would react to increased mechanization. I hungrily gobbled up every detail Asimov had to offer, and I think his New York will resonate with me for a long time to come. 
 There are different strategies for reading through the Foundation, Empire, and Robot novels. I elected to read the Foundation and the Empire series in the order they were published. I can better articulate now what it is that I didn't like about them: they were written to entertain (which, in itself, is not bad, but I was never really entertained with them). They did have some early indications of hard science fiction, but ultimately they were somewhat more somber, serious, and mature pulp adventure novels in space. The Caves of Steel was speculative fiction, and I've only recently come to understand why this is a genre to itself. I'll proceed with the series and happily endure another mystery novel so that I can read more about human-robot interactions in Asimov's future.