Elijah Baley

Elijah "Lije" Baley is a fictional character in Isaac Asimov's Robot series. He is the main character of the novels The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun and The Robots of Dawn, and of the short story "Mirror Image." He is seen in flashbacks several times and talked about frequently in Robots and Empire, which is set roughly 160 years after his death. Besides Asimov's works he appears in the Foundation's Friends story "Strip-Runner" by Pamela Sargent, and "Isaac Asimov's 'The Caves Of Steel'" poem by Randall Garrett.

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 most natives of Earth spend lives living 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. In the later stories he has limited success in overcoming his agoraphobia, which he recognizes as a potential limitation to his species and more directly his son. (Baley's agoraphobia mirrors Asimov's own personality, who was a well known .)

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.

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