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Asimov was eclectic. He never set out to write a consistent future history of the robots, even though the publication and the surprising success of
I, Robot,
with its parts glued together made it seem as if he had. A certain number of common elements and cross-references has tended to reinforce the illusion. But it would be a mistake to judge the robot stories on this basis.
I, Robot
is the only self-sufficient and almost self-consistent work and should be adequate for the critic who desires unity.
The robot stories are a body of literature, much like the Scandinavian sagas or the Greek legends, that focuses on the question of how one should respond to the reality of the particular universe in which these groups of stories exist, from a cluster of viewpoints. The greatest value of the robot stories is not in internal consistency but in multiplicity of consideration. In these stories Asimov provided readers with the unique excitement of an inquiring and artistic mind returning again and again to a single question and discovering not only new variations but sometimes different answers.
4 The Short Stories
Asimov's two great literary inventions the Foundation galaxy with its future history and psychohistory, and the realistic, production-model robot should not obscure his creation of an even more substantial body of individual stories and novels that are not linked by common characters or common themes, even though most of them fit into the same future history as
The Foundation Trilogy.
In this chapter and in Chapter 6, I discuss Asimov's non-series stories and novels. That means a return to the beginning of his science-fiction career.
Asimov had been writing science fiction for three years and seeing his stories published for two when, on March 17, 1941, he entered the office of the editor of
Astounding Science Fiction
as he had done many times before. As usual he had an idea for a story to discuss with Campbell, but this time Campbell brushed it aside. Campbell had his own idea to present.
As Asimov recalled in his autobiography:
He had come across a quotation from an eight-chapter work by Ralph Waldo Emerson called
Nature.
In the first chapter, Emerson said: If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God. Campbell asked me to read it and said, "What do you think would happen, Asimov, if men were to see the stars for the first time in a thousand years?"
I thought, and drew a blank. I said, "I don't know."
Campbell said, "I think they would go mad. I want you to write a story about that."
After discussing the idea with Campbell and providing answers to such Campbell questions as "why should the stars be invisible at other times?," Asimov went home to write the story. He started it the next evening.
It was a critical time in Asimov's development as a writer, although he was not to recognize that fact until much later. Up to that time he had written thirty-one stories and sold seventeen. Of the ones he had sold, only three measured up to his own standards of passability the three positronic robot stories, "Robbie," "Reason," and "Liar!" and only one of these, ''Liar!," suggested Asimov's future greatness. "My status on that evening of March 18," he wrote in his autobiography, "was as nothing more than a steady and (perhaps) hopeful third-rater. What's more, that's all that I considered myself at that time."
Despite Asimov's initial concern, the story developed with unprecedented ease. By April 8 it was finished, 13,300 words entitled "Nightfall." It was published in
Astounding
for September 1941. The magazine's cover painting illustrated the climactic scene of the novelette. Over it were the words:
NIGHTFALL
by Isaac Asimov
Almost thirty years later, the story led the voting by the Science Fiction Writers of America for stories that had appeared before 1965 the year of the first Nebula Awards and the first Nebula Award volume honoring the best science fiction of the year to be published in
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
After the publication of "Nightfall," Asimov recalled, "I was no longer a minor writer, hovering about the fringes of science-fiction fame. Finally, after three years of trying, I was accepted as a major figure in the field and I was still only twenty-one." To the detriment of his peace of mind but the benefit of his career, Asimov didn't realize that anything had changed. He kept struggling.
The story that marked such a turning point in Asimov's literary career is not exceptional in many ways (Asimov himself did not consider it either the best story of its pre-1965 period or even his own best story). The plot develops much more mechanically than in some of his better stories, even in some earlier ones such as "Liar!," the characters serve plot purposes and little else, and the language is functional. Why do readers, even fellow writers, rate it so high? The answer reflects the situation of science fiction in 1941. John W. Campbell, Jr., was consolidating his position of leadership in science fiction, and what was appearing in
Astounding
was becoming, for most science-fiction readers, the definition of science fiction.
The most important element of "Nightfall" was subject. It had a big
one: the relationship of people to the universe. This was to become the most significant theme Campbellian science fiction would explore. It asked: What is humanity? How does humanity understand itself and its situation? What can humanity do about it?
The story's second element, the reversal of situation, was another Campbell favorite. On the planet where "Nightfall" takes place, the situation is almost the reverse of the situation on Earth. Lagash experiences eternal day rather than the alternation of day and night. How this affects people's behavior becomes the subject of "Nightfall."
The third element was a clear-cut test of scientific investigation as opposed to other routes to "knowledge." Emerson's poetic vision was just the starting place. "Nightfall" begins with the Emerson quotation as an epigraph. The answer to Campbell's question ''why should the stars be invisible at other times?" was Lagash, a planet that is part of a complex solar phenomenon that places three pairs of suns in the sky. Alpha, around which Lagash orbits, has a small red-dwarf companion named Beta. There are two more distant pairs. One pair is named Gamma and Delta: the other pair is not called by name (logically they would be Epsilon and Zeta, but the nomenclature is only figurative anyway). The result is that Lagash is virtually never in darkness, for one or more of the suns is always in the sky. But once every two thousand and forty-nine years, a large moon, neither seen nor suspected until just before the story begins, eclipses Beta when that sun alone is in the sky. The eclipse covers all of Lagash and lasts more than half a day.
This, improbable and unstable an astronomical configuration though it is, sets up Emerson's world of if. It is not an exact replica, perhaps because Asimov felt that a one-thousand-year cycle of savagery to civilization would be implausible, perhaps because the longer time span would be approximately the length of time between the height of the Roman Empire and the present, or between Athenian democracy and Newton. A more likely reason is that an exact parallel would seem contrived and the point of the story would be seen as a simple attack on Emersonian romanticism.
Four hundred years before the story opens, a scientist named Genovi 41 (the Lagashian Galileo) discovered that Lagash rotated around Alpha rather than vice versa. Since then, astronomers have recorded and analyzed the complex motions of the six suns. Twenty years before the story begins, the Law of Universal Gravitation was discovered (by the Lagashian Newton) and used to explain the orbital motions of the six suns. In the last decade, the motions of Lagash have been studied: the Law could not explain them, however, until a satellite of Lagash was
postulated. Two months before the story begins, the scientists at Saro University calculated the orbit of the suspected satellite and came up with the prediction of Beta's eclipse. This had been matched with archeological evidence that nine or more previous civilizations on Lagash had reached levels comparable to the present one and then had been mysteriously destroyed by fire.
Further evidence is provided by a cult built around a legend that every two thousand and fifty years Lagash enters a huge cave, all the suns disappear, total darkness comes over all the world, and things called Stars appear, rob men of their souls, and leave them unreasoning brutes who destroy their own civilization. In the two months following the prediction of Beta's eclipse, Saro University scientists have built a Hideout where some three hundred people, mostly women and children, will be shut away from the eclipse and the predicted madness, with food, weapons, and all printed records except the photographs to be taken of the eclipse and the Stars, whatever they are, at the Observatory.
The story develops mostly through lectures by the Director of the University, Aton 77, and a psychologist, Sheerin 501, to Theremon 762, a newspaper reporter who has been ridiculing their predictions in his newspaper column. A Cultist, Latimer 25, also appears, with the intention of destroying the astronomical cameras set up to record the Stars; he thinks photographs will damage the Stars' religious significance. At the end, the eclipse begins. A mob, incited by the Cultists, gathers in the city to storm the Observatory. Its attack is held off until totality occurs and the Stars appear. Everyone goes insane, and Saro City begins to burn as the crazed citizens try to create light.
The story succeeds partly because it is a mystery to be solved, a puzzle to be worked out. Asimov is feeling his way toward his method and recapitulating the way in which he too was forced to solve the question that Campbell posed to him: under what conditions might Emerson's world-of-if become reality, and what would happen if it did? The reader begins by struggling with the meaning of "nightfall," a word that does not occur in the body of the story and for good reason. The Lagashians have no experience with that period of darkness Terrans call night. (The word "night" is used only at the end, in a metaphorical sense in the final sentence, "The long night had come again.") What is this experience of nightfall that Aton describes in such terrible terms on the second page? ''In just under four hours civilization, as we know it, comes to an end. It will do so because, as you see, Beta is the only sun in the sky." The rest of the story, largely lecture though it is, is the
explication of that mystery and the establishment of psychological credibility for the final scene.
BOOK: Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition)
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