The Naked Sun

The Naked Sun is a science fiction novel by the American writer Isaac Asimov, serialised in Astounding Science Fiction between October and December 1956 and published in book form in 1957. It is the second of his novels about the detective Elijah Baley.

Baley is sent from a crowded, roofed-over Earth to Solaria, where a small population lives on vast isolated estates, served by robots and shielded from every kind of physical closeness. The dead man had been working on something the other Solarians knew nothing about, and the customs of the planet make ordinary police work difficult: Baley cannot interview anyone face to face without giving offence, and the open sky and long distances that Solarians find restful frighten him. He works the case with R. Daneel Olivaw, the robot partner from his previous investigation.

Asimov keeps the book inside the detective form while using it to test what a society built on complete robot labour and extreme privacy would actually be like. The murder is solved by establishing what the people around the victim were willing, and unwilling, to do.