My Top Asimov Stories #1: “The Last Question”

My favorite short story of all time is Asimov’s “The Last Question.”  It’s scale, both in space and time, is very extensive for a short story, and it is very plot-based, not centered around a particular human character but around the computer Multivac, a recurring “character” in Asimov’s stories set in the Robot Era.  ”The Last Question” was published in the November 1956 edition of Science Fiction Quarterly and has been anthologized many times.

The story follows a series of characters, each who by one circumstance or another end up asking Multivac how the total entropy (or heat death, or “running-down”) of the universe can be reversed.  However, each time, despite the vast resources and power of the computer, it cannot come up with an answer and each human character is disappointed.

As the story progresses, we see the evolution of both Man and Multivac.  The computer begins as an extensive machine, occupying multiple buildings much like the computers which were being developed when the story was written.  Soon, however, Multivac becomes both smaller and farther-reaching, until it has become the central control of everything for humanity.  Humanity, to the same effect, expands it’s control over countless millions of planets and multiplies to the trillions of trillions.  Their evolution parallels each other, Multivac moving entirely into hyperspace (without physical parts) and humanity separating themselves from their physical bodies, becoming only consciousnesses.  In the final stages of this evolution, all the consciousnesses of humanity combine into one to become Man, and ask the entropy question one last time.  But the all-knowing Multivac still can’t answer, and as the universe dies Man merges with Multivac and disappears.  But Multivac continues to ponder the answer, outside of the limitations of space and time, and eventually comes up with the answer, and I’ll let you read the solution.

Part of what makes this story incredible, once again, is the scale at which “The Last Question” operates, at which most novels would not attempt.  In one short story Asimov has traipsed through the entire future evolution of Man to it’s pinnacle and come back, and as usual, makes the reader think about life and the Universe in general.

Asimov consistently said that this story was his favorite, and I certainly agree with him.  Normally I would not do this (because I want you to go buy the works) but this may or may not be the full text.

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• Top Asimov Stories #5: “The Evitable Conflict” (expandingconsciousness.wordpress.com)
• The oeuvre of Isaac Asimov (cathicarolblog.wordpress.com)
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My Top Asimov Stories #2: “Bicentennial Man”

“Bicentennial Man” is a novelette about a robot who, over a period of about 200 years, becomes human.  It was published in 1976 and won both the Hugo and Nebula awards the same year.

The story revolves around a robot named Andrew, who by some irregularity in his positronic pathways is able to independently create wooden carvings.  As creativity is not a part of a robot’s skills, his owner, Gerald Martin (Sir), sees him as extremely unique and allows Andrew to sell his carvings, keeping half.

Image via Wikipedia

As his family gets older, Andrew uses his money to keep himself in good shape, and expands his creativity and knowledge beyond what any ordinary robot would.  Andrew asks Sir to allow him to buy his freedom, and on his deathbed, Sir relents, not accepting Andrew’s money.  Andrew begins wearing clothes and going to the library to further his knowledge.  He also, with the help of Sir’s grandson, a lawyer, begins to change the legal system as it pertains to robots, starting by banning orders to self-harm, meant to protect Andrew.

Soon, Andrew begins to drastically alter his own body, experimenting and designing parts himself, with the ultimate goal of being unrecognizable as a robot.  He gives himself digestive and excretory systems, hoping that eventually he will be officially declared to be a man.  However, on his 150th birthday, he is called the “Sesquicentennial Robot.”  Their reservations seem to be because of his immortality.

His final modification changes their minds: He alters his positronic brain so that it will decay with time, arranging to live through his 200th birthday.  He goes before the World Legislature, telling them what he has done from a wheelchair, and on his birthday they declare him the “Bicentennial Man.”

If this plot sounds familiar, that would be because it was made into a film in 1999 starring Robin Williams.  The film follows the basic premises and names fairly closely, but in it’s details it is not particularly faithful to Asimov‘s original.  The story, like “Nightfall” and “The Ugly Little Boy,” was expanded into a novel by Asimov and Robert Silverberg in 1993 called The Positronic Man.

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Top Asimov Stories #4: “Nightfall”

“Nightfall” is a widely popular story, often listed as one of the greatest science fiction stories of all time.  It was published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1941 and it was voted the best science fiction short story to be published before the establishment of the Nebula Awards in 1965 (and therefore not eligible for one).  The story was adapted into a full-length novel by Asimov and Robert Silverburgin 1990.

Asimov says in his autobiography that the story was inspired by a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

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 which had been shown!

The editor of Astounding at the time, John W. Campbell, thought that, on the contrary, men would go mad.  So the story’s primary theme is the juxtaposition of the two theories.  It takes place on a planet with six suns, on a day in which there will be darkness for the first time in two thousand years: five of the suns have rotated to the other side of the planet, and the sixth will be eclipsed by the planet’s satellite.  The story revolves around a certain columnist’s interactions with a group of scientists who believe that this darkness will cause widespread madness and the destruction of their civilization.  The fear is of the “Stars,” which to people who have never seen them before would cause great anxiety.

The story puts in proportion the stars we see every night and take for granted, showing that they are beautiful and much more mysterious than we often realize.  And isn’t that what every great story is supposed to do, put things in better perspective?

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One Step Closer to (Or Farther from) Asimov’s “Bicentennial Man”

A new story outlines the recent advances in bionic prosthetic limbs.  How does this relate to Asimov‘s Bicentennial Man, the robot who became a man and in turn made many people part-robot?

One of Asimov’s best short stories is called The Bicentennial Man, and it is about a robot named Andrew who is unique and can create art, typically something robots cannot do.  He longs to be human, but cannot because he is effectively immortal, despite having every other human quality.  Eventually he creates parts for himself that allow him every physical human facility, including death.  Along the way he uses the technology he creates for himself to build robot limbs and organs for people, blurring the line between robot and human.  Just before he dies he is declared to be human, allowing him solace in death.  The film version of this, which many of you will probably be much more familiar with, sexualizes the story, making his quest for humanity a result of his love for a human woman.  I seriously doubt that was Asimov’s intention, but it doesn’t really matter too much; the point remains.

While the idea of a robot becoming human will very likely never happen, undoubtedly not within our lifetimes, the trend of humans becoming more robotic is a very real one.  Prosthetic limbs that are connected to the nerve endings and can be controlled through them are already in production, and artificial hearts are also being used all the time, though not for extended periods.

At what point will we be able to create organs that can replace our current organs seamlessly, for babies with bad hearts and middle-aged men with kidney problems?  At what point will we be so inundated with artificial organs that we are indistinguishable from robots, except for our brains?

Hard Vs. Soft Science Fiction

There is always a big difference between hard and soft science fiction, and I have been writing about hard science fiction here and haven’t really explained it well.

Hard Science Fiction is science fiction that emphasizes the technical, the scientific, and it is this emphasis that drives nearly every aspect.  Many of the best hard science fiction writers are also scientists, and often many of the scientific hypotheses that they cannot publish in their academic field they use in their writing, so that the technical aspect of their stories are very realistic, or at least very possible.

Of the Big Three science fiction writers (Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein), all three either featured elements of hard science fiction, had brilliant flashes of it, or, in Asimov’s case, wrote it solely.  Other major writers of hard science fiction include Frederik Pohl, Hal Clement, Poul Anderson, Ben Bova, L. Sprague de Camp, and, much earlier, H.G. Wells.

Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, and Isaac Asimov in 1944. All three worked at the Philadelphia Naval Yard together during World War II.

Of these writers, Asimov had a doctorate in biochemistry, Clarke was Chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, Clement had degrees in astronomy and chemistry, Anderson had a degree in physics, Bova was a technical writer for Project Vanguard, and de Camp had degrees in engineering.

This very academic-based scientific writing is the whole basis behind hard science fiction.  Every idea that comes out of this genre has some real, scientific hypothesis behind it, and often these hypotheses eventually come true.  Clarke described geostationary communications satellites in 1945, more than a decade before Sputnik 1 was launched by the Soviet Union.  Asimov coined the term “robotics” in 1941.

Soft science fiction, on the other hand, deals with more speculative ideas and more ambiguous and conceptive sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, and political science.  In my opinion, these are much easier ideals to write under, being much more flexible and “soft,” making it much easier for certain works to fit inside.

Hard science fiction predicts the future, to put it simply.  Don’t go read scientist’s views on the future; read hard science fiction and see what will happen to us in the years to come.

Japan’s Nuclear Crisis: Science Fiction Precedents

The recent nuclear issues at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi plant (triggered by the March 11 earthquake-tsunami) are beginning to be compared to the Chernobyl disaster in the Ukrainian SSR in 1986, considered the worst nuclear disaster to date.  While leakage amounts are only considered to be one-tenth that of Chernobyl standards, the plant is not expected to be put in full cold shutdown for another nine months, making it possible for much more to leak.

Chernobyl was estimated to have directly killed 31 men, mostly workers inside the reactor, and indirectly as few as 4,000 (WHO) to as many as 200,000 (Greenpeace) or even 985,000 by an independent Russian publication (you can read about that one on your own).

The science fiction precedent, promised in the title of this post?  Asimov’s entire Galactic Empire series of novels have, in the background, the point that Earth has been turned radioactive, albeit by nuclear war, but radioactive, nonetheless.  Asimov wrote Pebble in the Sky, the first novel to mention this idea, in 1951, at the early height of the Cold War, when nuclear war was certainly a possibility and could destroy the Earth as it was.

While the causes are entirely different, one can see the issues with nuclear reactions.  Asimov didn’t mean to scare people, he simply wanted to educate them to the dangers of nuclear physics.  Even with the end of the Cold War, the danger still exists.

Foundation Film

Isaac Asimovs Foundation

I know it has been a couple of years since any news came out about this, but I want to comment on it anyway: a film adaptation of Isaac Asimov‘s Foundation has been in the works for some time, but after a bidding war left it in the hands of Sony, the front-runner to direct is Roland Emmerich, director of such thinkers as Independence Day, The Day after Tomorrow, and 2012. How would a director known for making things blow up direct a story with no action in it such as Foundation? It doesn’t make any sense to me.

The depressing thing about the whole situation is that Warner Bros. choice to direct was Alex Proyas, best known for directing I, Robot and Knowing (I, Robot also being based on an Asimov story).  In exactly the opposite fashion as Emmerich, Proyas specializes in movies that make you think; Emmerich would use too much action and special effects to keep the main idea of the story.  Foundation needs a director that can do the psychological aspect justice, a staple in any Asimov story.

Top Ten Asimov Stories

My favorite Asimov stories, in reverse order (some have full-text links, some do not):

10. Sally

9. I’m in Marsport Without Hilda

8. A Matter of Principle

7. Robbie

6. …That Thou Art Mindful Of Him

5. The Evitable Conflict

4. Nightfall

3. The Ugly Little Boy

2. The Bicentennial Man

1. The Last Question

Writing Science Fiction

For my first post, I suppose I will introduce myself.  I am Kayle Hodges, a professional writing student at a particular football school in the Southwest (#1 Program of the Modern Era) and I want to write and write about science fiction.  I don’t think I am as much of a nerd as it may seem from that simple statement, but I may be wrong.

My favorite writers are Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, Arthur C. Clarke, and Douglas Adams.  Yes, I said Douglas Adams, the writer of The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (among other things).

Arthur C. Clarke said, “No less a critic than C. S. Lewis has described the ravenous addiction that these magazines inspired; the same phenomenon has led me to call science fiction the only genuine consciousness-expanding drug.”

Other types of writing simply entertain (if they are good), but they don’t often make the reader think.  Science Fiction consistently has the quality that makes one think about the world, the future, and the vastness of life itself, while also making him feel minuscule under the scope of the Galaxy.  That quality I most enjoy of Asimov’s, in particular, is the scale to which he writes; the primary universe he writes in starts merely years ahead of us to millennia into the future, to when we had colonized the stars and no longer even knew what planet we originated from.

For this blog I will be writing about science fiction in general, especially Hard Science Fiction.  Is that too broad a subject?  No, because I believe Hard Science Fiction itself is too small a subject to be divided further, especially since fewer and fewer authors are writing it today.  Is typing and then answering my own questions too cliched? Yeah, probably.

My First Post: Quotes

“Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.”  -Brian Aldiss

“It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”  -Robert Benchley

“Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.”  -Charles Caleb Colton

“The book that he has made renders its author this service in return, that so long as the book survives, its author remains immortal and cannot die.”  -Richard de Bury

“Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it’s the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. …Science fiction is central to everything we’ve ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don’t know what they’re talking about.”  -Ray Bradbury

“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.”  -Elmore Leonard

“I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.”  -English Professor (Name Unknown), Ohio University

“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.”  -Lord Byron

“Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.” – Isaac Asimov