The Caves of Steel
1954
The Earth is carrying a huge population of almost 40 billion. This obscene population is housed in a number of Cities; roofed over, deeply dug caverns linked together by tunnels. Out amongst the stars are fifty almost empty worlds occupied by almost 40 million people in total.
And several billion robots.
Naturally these are points of tension, exacerbated by the fact that the Spacers have banned Earthers from emigrating and have backed it up by a blockade of the Solar system and, ultimate indignity, an outpost on Earth itself!
The Spacers on Earth are trying to get Earthers to introduce more robots into the economy to create an underclass so that they will go out and start colonising once more.
They created the underclass but this merely led to even greater resentment. The Spacers design a special Humaniform robot who looks almost exactly like a human and program him to investigate the situation.
Unfortunately, before the project could get off the ground, the head of the project was blown away, quite literally - a blaster blowing a hole in his chest. No one in Space Town (including NYPD's Commissioner) was judged guilty so the Spacers said that it must be a man from the City, but no man of Earth could get to Space Town except through guarded accessways or the open countryside and every Earthperson suffers from severe acrophobia...
So instead of being used in sociological research the Humaniform robot, R Daneel Olivaw, gets seconded to NYPD as the partner of Elijah Bailey, plainclothesman.
The book details the 'fun' they have in overcoming the difficulties of winnowing out the true culprit from over two million possible suspects. And no one on earth really likes the Spacers...
But solve the problem they must, or else the Spacers will leave the Earth to it's decay.
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