Book Report: Caves! Of!! Steeeeeeeeeel!!!!!!!

I’m sure that the first time I read Caves of Steel, probably the first half-dozen times I read it, all in the seventies and eighties, I’m guessing, I was able to look at the spine of the book and read the title without saying Caves! Of!! Steeeeeeeeeel!!!!!!! When I saw the book recently, though, I gave in to the compulsion. I have no idea, really, whether the title was actually ominous in 1954, or whether perhaps the idea of a natural formation replicated in such an industrial material was new and provocative. And I suppose that professional wrestling, even televised professional wrestling in that area would very likely have made use of a similar (if nonsensical) phrase in a similar tone of voice. When did Superman become known as the Man of Steel? And would you have to say Superman: Man! Of!! Steeeeeeeeeel!!!!!!!? In fact, I have no idea what I am specifically referencing, other than a general sense of the ludicrously overmasculine phraseology. On the other hand, I tend to refer to the 1995 Johnny Depp starrer by saying its title much the same way, with the same bolding and exclamation points. Maybe one more exclamation point.

One the other hand, you might think from that example that all the exclamation points and the bolding mean that the item in question stinks on ice. Not so. I mean, yes, obviously, the movie does, boy howdy, you could show it on the North Pole and the Finns would be complaining about the stench. Not a good movie. I think later they made it into fifteen different television series, but I’m not sure. No, the novel Caves! Of!! Steeeeeeeeeel!!!!!!! is actually not so bad as all that. It does have the Asimov thing, where you have to get used to the idea that humans in his novel do not speak like actual humans, but that’s a sort of authorial convention, and once you get the hang of the way humans in his books speak, the dialogue fades into the background and you can enjoy the story for what it is. Which is, after all, really good.

The clever thing about it is that it’s a futuristic locked-room mystery, where instead of making the room locked in some high-tech futuristic way he leaves the room wide open but makes entering through any unobserved entrance taboo. This works surprisingly well. It makes very little sense, but it doesn’t have to make any sense. Then he buries the actual mystery in layers of distracting irrelevancies, but not so’s I notice that the irrelevancies are irrelevant. Even re-reading the thing again after all these years, knowing that not only was there no point to chasing after the conspiracy but that it was totally implausible that the characters would have thought that there was a point to chasing after the conspiracy, when they go chasing after the conspiracy, I don’t mind at all. So when we finally come around again to the solution, and it’s something that any moron ought to have seen the moment the murder was committed, not only do I not object that I ought to have seen it from the beginning, I don’t object that everybody else in the book ought to have seen it from the beginning.

Also, there’s a lot of goofy fifties futurism involving alpha-sprayers and cerebroanalysis. And that’s got to be good.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.