Point of View

The Robots of Dawn is told in the third person, past tense, with all of the action concentrated on a single character, New York City homicide detective Elijah Baley, who undertakes an investigation on the Spacer world Aurora, where he is entirely out of place culturally. This allows the author to develop the differences between various separated branches of the human race. The anonymous narrator reveals the characters' minds without the need for dialogue, although dialogue is frequent. Baley is assisted by two robots, one humaniform, R. Daneel Olivaw, with whom he has worked several cases and enjoys a friendship that makes it hard to consider Daneel non-human; and R. Giskard Reventlov, a "normal," metal-cased robot, whose abilities are easily overlooked. Dialogue among them is stylized an brisk, as the robots are highly literal and precise.

Baley is a veteran investigator skilled at interrogation and ferreting...