Elijah Baley - Biography

Biography

He is a plainclothesman, a homicide detective in the New York City Police Department 3,000 years in the future. He is a doleful character with a quick temper. Like Sherlock Holmes, he is a pipe-smoker – a habit he fights against in The Robots of Dawn. He has a strong sense of duty and loyalty and is very protective of his family and his status. His wife, Jezebel Baley, prefers to be called Jessie. Their son, Bentley, became a leader in the second wave of interplanetary space exploration.

Baley, like most earth-born human beings of his century, is strongly agoraphobic, as The Caves of Steel reveals that almost all natives of Earth of Baley's time spend all of their time from birth to death in immense domed cities ("caves of steel") and rarely, if ever, travel to the outside surface. Baley's agoraphobia is an important personality characteristic and plot point in several of the novels in which he appears. (This somewhat mirrors Asimov's own personality, as he was a well known claustrophile, a person who prefers to be in enclosed spaces.)

Asimov's novels are typically devoid of profanity. Consequently, Baley's favourite expletive is "Jehoshaphat!" which he says in times of great stress or excitement.

In The Caves of Steel, he is called upon to help solve the murder of a Spacer. The Spacers assign him a robot partner, R. Daneel Olivaw, who becomes his lifelong friend. He meets up with R. Daneel again in The Naked Sun, where again he is asked to investigate the murder of a Spacer, this time on the planet Solaria, making him the first Earthman to leave Earth since the first wave of colonization. Later, in the Robots of Dawn, he recognizes R. Giskard's telepathic abilities long before anyone else does. Giskard modifies Baley's mind to prevent him from being able to tell anyone.

Some details of Baley's life lack continuity throughout the Robot novels. In The Caves of Steel, for example, it is noted that Baley's mother died shortly after his father was declassified (lost his civil classification and therefore all social and economic status), and that Elijah did not remember her. However, in The Robots of Dawn, Baley recalls his mother cajoling him to eat her chicken soup and telling him that even the Spacers did not have anything as good. In The Caves of Steel, Baley is also reported to have a sister, but she is never referred to again. In the same way, Baley's intense shame at his father's declassification and the resulting deprivations of his childhood are not referred to in succeeding novels, somewhat diluting his motivation to succeed and preserve (or improve) his own civil classification and the privileges it entails.

In later stories, it is revealed that Elijah becomes a legendary hero for millennia. References to him can be found in Prelude to Foundation and Foundation and Earth.