The core detective story here holds up fairly well, and some of the basics of human-robot fears (primarily unemployment) hold up pretty well too.

But boy… so much else does not. There’s both the trivial (our hero is really concerned about tobacco rations for his pipe… to smoke during meetings!) but also much deeper cringe—the treatment of the only woman in the story is deeply misogynistic, and to put the robots in their place characters call them “boy”. In that sense, it’s a good reminder that our modern science fiction is made much more interesting by taking seriously the interests of everyone, not just white men, but … hard to recommend reading just for that.

Perhaps the one thing that’s actually interesting as a time capsule is that the book’s plot is driven in large part by scarcity, in a way we don’t tend to think much about (or at least very differently). Food is presumed to be a big challenge in the year 5000ish, because the earth’s population is… eight billion! (We’re at 7.9B right now, and food insecurity, while a very real problem, has never been lower globally.) Phone calls are rationed! And there’s the potential for running out of energy because we’re… using all the uranium! (It does, at one point, nod towards disposal of radioactive waste as a problem, which does remain real, but in a very different way than Asimov predicted.) This probably particularly jumped out at me because I just finished reading Charles Mann’s Wizard and the Prophet, which talks a lot about the intellectual debates in the late 1940s-early 1950s that both led to much of modern environmentalism and almost certainly informed Asimov’s writing in the late 1950s.

Bottom line: this isn’t bad but it got so much wrong, is deeply problematic, and is a good reminder that the true Golden Age of scifi right now, not 65 years ago.