At the time of writing, Asimov conceived of The Caves of Steel as completely distinct from his Foundation Trilogy, published a few years earlier.

Decades later, however, Asimov linked them, making the time of Caves of Steel a much earlier part of an extensive future history leading up to the rise of the Galactic Empire, its fall and the rise of two Foundations to replace it – with the Robot R. Daneel Olivaw, introduced in Caves of Steel, turning out to have survived over tens of thousands of years and have played a key role in the eras of both the Empire and the Foundation(s).

In The Caves of Steel and its sequels (the first of which is The Naked Sun), Asimov paints a grim situation of an Earth dealing with an extremely large population and of luxury-seeking Spacers, who limit birth to permit great wealth and privacy.

Asimov was a claustrophile: "I wrote a novel in 1953 which pictured a world in which everyone lived in underground cities, comfortably enclosed away from the open air.

Asimov imagines the present day underground transit connected to malls and apartment blocks, until no one ever exits the domes and most of the population suffer from extreme fear of leaving them.

Their job accomplished, the Spacers make plans to leave Earth as their continued presence would be to the detriment of their cause; they accept Sarton's unsolved death as a necessary sacrifice.

Meanwhile, the New York Police Commissioner, Julius Enderby, who is Baley's friend from college, now his boss, and the head of the investigation on Earth, has been acting suspiciously.

Baley eventually deduces Enderby is secretly a member of the Medievalists, a subversive anti-robot group which pines for the 'olden days' where men did not live in the 'caves of steel'.

Having already accepted that Sarton's death is unsolved, the Spacers are willing to not prosecute Enderby for the accident if he agrees to work with them to promote colonization of other worlds amongst the Medievalists.

In order of appearance, described: Reviewer Groff Conklin praised the novel for the way Asimov "combines his interest in robotics with his consuming preoccupation with the sociology of a technology-mad, bureaucratically tethered world of tomorrow.

"[4] Boucher and McComas praised The Caves of Steel as "Asimov's best long work to date", saying that it was "the most successful attempt yet to combine" the detective and science fiction novel.

"[6] Villiers Gerson of The New York Times wrote: "Here is an unusually exciting and engrossing detective story set in a science fictional background convincingly worked out.

In June 1989, the book was adapted by Bert Coules as a radio play for the BBC, with Ed Bishop as Elijah Baley and Sam Dastor as R. Daneel Olivaw.

The only major deviation was the conclusion – in the television version the murderer commits suicide when he is unmasked, although in the novel he agrees to work to convince the Medievalists to change their ways.

Cast of BBC Radio 4 Adaptation: In 1988 Kodak produced a VCR game entitled "Isaac Asimov's Robots" that contained a 45-minute film loosely based on The Caves of Steel.