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Like much of Asimov's work, this is based around a mystery format (the murder of a 'Spacer' or space colonist in a camp outside the future steel city of New York). It's a set up that Asimov uses to discuss the possible problems that humans will face in the future and as a result the solving of the murder takes something of a back seat and is solved in a perfunctory way. It's very much a product of its time - but whereas I'd always associated Asimov with those early science-fiction writers who had a rosy view of the future, I was surprised to see that his Earth of the future in a planet on the cusp of crisis.

People are assigned specific rankings within the society, with each rank providing its own privileges. As a C-5 rated officer, Lije Baley is entitled to his own apartment, with a sink basin (so he and his family don't have to use the communal facilties within their apartment block if they don't wish to) and special food rations (much is made of the fact that he can eat proper chicken from time to time, rather than the yeast food products that are the norm) and he can use special moving pathways and have a seat on certain transporters. His greatest fear though is of being 'declassified', a fate that happened to his father - whereby whole families are thrown to the fringes of the city, deprived of its benefits, prohibited from getting a job and forced to scrape a living from the inadequate soil. It's this fear that provides one of his main motivations throughout the book - if he solves the mystery then he will get a promotion to C-6, which will see his family given greater benefits. If he fails - specifically, if he annoys the Spacer colony in doing so - then he will be declassified and his family will suffer his fate.

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