For the latter part of this week, I've been in Minneapolis for a meeting, I flew up here Wednesday and will head back on Sunday. As usual, I found a book to read for the flight, an interesting book that would keep my attention for the boring flights. This time I chose Isaac Asimov's Steel Caves, the second in his "Robot Series" of books. I had read the first (Robots of Dawn) a couple of weeks ago and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I was fairly certain the rest of the series would be just as good. I wasn't disapointed.

After reading these books, I find myself noticing more and more parallels with our society's current state and the world of Asimov's future. For instance, I noticed closed circuit cameras everywhere in the airport, and in other public places around town. I began noticing some of the more futuristic things scattered about, such as the lounge in the airport specifically designed for the business traveler to hook up to a high speed connection in a small private kiosk. In Asimov's future, privacy is a thing of the past, almost even in a person's home (which are no longer houses, but apartments in huge sckyscraper complexes.) Communal kitchens serve the masses, as well as men's and women's "personals" where one sees to their personal hygene needs similar to a central bathroom in college dorms. All in all, Asimov predicts that for efficiency reasons privacy will be whittled down to the bare minimum in the future. What scares me the most, is Asimov's dead on (in my opinion) assessment of the human race. In not-so-subtle ways he uses our tendency toward racism and applies it to robot-human relations. In other ways he discusses overpopulation and polution problems and how the human race is inevitably self-destructive. His stories are at once entertaining, but have depth and bring out some interesting views.