Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition) Page 11

  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.

  A major part of the story's appeal, certainly for Campbell and no doubt for his readers as well, was the alignment of forces: the rational people, the scientists, opposed by the irrational, the mobs and the Cultists. The mobs reject the warnings of the scientists because ordinary people place their faith in everyday experience continuing as it always has and will not believe in such abstractions as theories of gravitation and calculations about an invisible satellite. The Cultists, on the other hand, have preserved unique information about earlier catastrophes, but they interpret that information according to their desires rather than their intellects. They reject scientific "facts" in favor of religious "knowledge." They are right about events but for the wrong reasons, and thus their responses are also irrational.

  Against these forces Asimov placed the scientists, who may be passionate enough in pursuit of their goals (Aton blusters at Theremon, and another astronomer, Beenay, attacks Latimer), but they are willing to accept whatever "truth" best explains the facts. In earlier stories ("Black Friar of the Flame," which was written early in 1939, "Half-Breed," ''The Secret Sense," etc.), Asimov had sometimes allowed emotion to become a motivating force. In "Nightfall" he established the position that he was to maintain throughout most of the rest of his work: rationality must struggle to prevail in a world made difficult not only by the mysteries and hard truths of the universe but by people unable or unwilling to think clearly. The subject of "Nightfall" is ignorance; ignorance of the laws that govern the universe, ignorance of phenomena such as "night" and "stars," which makes the Lagashians, even the scientists, victims of their fears.

  Asimov's style suited his subjects and his method. The mystery and the puzzle are story types in which only rationality can prevail, and Asimov's direct, clear prose, as unlyrical and unmetaphorical as possible, persuaded readers that they were being presented all the facts upon which to draw their own conclusions. Asimov, in fact, objected to a paragraph that Campbell inserted near the end of the story:

  Not Earth's feeble thirty-six hundred Stars visible to the eye: Lagash was in the center of a giant cluster. Thirty thousand mighty suns shone down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indifference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world.

  In his autobiography Asimov complained that this simply wasn't me. It has been praised as proof that I could write "poetically," which gravels me, since I don't want to write poetically: I only want to write clearly. Worst of all, Campbell thoughtlessly mentions Earth in his paragraph. I had carefully refrained from doing so all through the story, since Earth did not exist within the context of the story. Its mention was a serious literary flaw.

  Earth, of course, could not exist within the context of the story because if Lagash were aware of Earth, the psychological fear of darkness and the Stars would be irreparably weakened. The entire paragraph is an intrusion, literally, of the "editorial" voice.

  A few other rewards for the science-fiction reader emerge from the story, such as the application of the meaning derived from the unique situation of Lagash and its outcome to the situation of Earth: if Lagashians are psychological victims of their environment, how does Earth's environment in a similar way affect us psychologically, religiously? The reader enjoys knowledge greater than that of the characters. Beenay, for instance, speculates about the incredible possibility of the Stars being distant suns, maybe as many as two dozen suns in a universe eight light-years across, and about the question of how simple the law of gravitation would be in a one-sun system. The former speculation makes readers smile at Beenay's naiveté; the latter gives them pause. The law of gravitation was not that simple for humanity Newton came up with his law at a moment in western civilization roughly comparable to that in Lagash's development. Beenay also comments that life would be impossible on a planet with only one sun, since life is fundamentally dependent on light, and that planet would have none half the time. From this the reader realizes the difficulty of imagining an alien existence. Sheerin also praises the torch as a really efficient artificial-light mechanism, providing the reader with more comparative speculation. And Beenay urges the astronomers, just before totality, not to waste time trying to get two Stars at a time in the scope field "one is enough."

  The final impact of the story comes from the size of its concept and the image with which the story concludes civilization burning, even the rational astronomers themselves maddened by the sight of the Stars in a pair of passages that are not without their own poetry:

  For this was the Dark the Dark and the Cold and the Doom. The bright walls of the universe were shattered and their awful black fragments were falling down to crush and squeeze and obliterate him [Theremon]. . . .

  Aton, somewhere, was crying, whimpering horribly like a terribly frightened child. "Stars all the Stars we didn't know at all. We didn't know anything. We thought six stars in a universe is something the Stars didn't notice is Darkness forever and ever and ever and the walls are breaking in and we didn't know we couldn't know and anything"

  Someone clawed at the torch, and it fell and snuffed out. In the instant, the awful splendor of the indifferent Stars leaped nearer to them. . . .

  Only the thought of the three hundred possible survivors tucked away from all the madness in the Hideout and representing a possible break with the terrible consequences of ignorance, remains to sustain the reader.

  Asimov's own three favorite short stories that he considered better than "Nightfall" were "The Last Question" (1956), "The Bicentennial Man" (1976), and "The Ugly Little Boy'' (1958). (There may be others.) All were written much later than "Nightfall," with greater craft and in more skillful prose. Readers still may have reasons to prefer "Nightfall." "The Last
Question," for instance, deals with a subject even larger than "Nightfall" the death and creation of the universe but it contains virtually no characters. Readers may marvel at its cleverness but are unlikely to be moved by it. "The Bicentennial Man" and "The Ugly Little Boy" are Asimovian anomalies. They are sentimental stories of character in which people change rather than solve puzzles (although there is some puzzle-solving in "The Bicentennial Man"). Their implications are personal rather than species-wide; they deal with individuals rather than civilizations or humanity itself.

  Before "Nightfall," Asimov's stories, with a few exceptions, had been imitative and relatively undistinguished. He says as much (in The Early Asimov) when he describes "Half-Breed" (Astounding, February 1940), in which he placed an intelligent race on Mars, one that was sufficiently like Earthmen to make interbreeding possible. "I just accepted science fictional clichés. Eventually I stopped doing that." This, of course, is how most writers begin. They are directed toward writing by a love of reading and they re-create what they love. Eventually, if they have talent, they find their own subjects and their own ways of dealing with them.

  Asimov's first published story, "Marooned Off Vesta," interestingly enough, held at its heart the Asimovian subject the rational mind presented with problems by the universe, by accident, or sometimes by the irrational elements in humanity and the Asimovian method: the characters are faced with a puzzle or a mystery and work toward a solution. In the story, a spaceship accident maroons a group of survivors three hundred miles from the asteroid Vesta, where help is available.

  They must find a way to propel the wreckage toward the asteroid. One of them finally rigs a method of releasing water retained in the wreck as a jet of steam: even at the low temperature of space, water boils in a vacuum.

  "The Callistan Menace," the first story Asimov wrote, also was a puzzle, but not much of one. Originally, it had been titled "Stowaway" because a space-struck boy of about thirteen stows away aboard a ship heading for the mystery world Callisto, a satellite of Jupiter. Crewmen are in danger of being killed by giant Callistan magnet worms when the boy emerges in a non-metallic rubber spacesuit to rescue them.

  Asimov's tenth story and his first in Astounding, "Trends," was not a puzzle story and seems comparatively weaker for that reason. It was about the first steps toward spaceflight, and its chief claim to significance was its prediction of resistance to space exploration. Campbell may have liked it not only for its social theme but for the fact that the resistance to space-flight was led by an evangelical religious group and its charismatic leader.

  Over the next year Asimov wrote nine more stories and sold about half of them. He was published in Amazing, Astonishing, Cosmic, Future, Super Science, and Planet, but not in Astounding again until he wrote his nineteenth story, "Homo Sol" (September 1940). The story is important in that it is in some ways prefatory to the Foundation stories, as is the earlier written but later-published "Black Friar of the Flames" (Planet, Spring 1942). "Homo Sol" inspired in Asimov a resolution not to deal with aliens and thus to avoid Campbell's biases and his own futile arguments. That resolution may have led to Asimov's all-human galaxy, which at the time was a distinctive aspect of the Foundation stories.

  July 29, 1940, Asimov notes in The Early Asimov, was a turning point in his publishing career. Up to that day he had written twenty-two stories in twenty-five months. Of these he had sold (or was to sell) thirteen; nine never sold and no longer exist. After this day, except for two short-short stories, he never again wrote a science-fiction story that he could not sell.

  "Not Final!" (Astounding, October 1941) is the first nonrobot, non-Foundation story after "Nightfall" that hints at Asimov's future capabilities. Like "Nightfall," the theme of "Not Final!" has magnitude. Human spaceships have achieved interplanetary flight. Inhabitants of Jupiter have been contacted by radio, but once they learn that humans are not Jovians they send a final message that humans are vermin and will be destroyed. With all the resources of mighty Jupiter and a technology equal to that of Earth, the Jovians cannot be stopped.

  There is one small catch: no kind of matter known can withstand the pressure of Jupiter without smashing, and no Jovian spaceship can leave Jupiter without exploding. In the final scene, however, a human inventor develops a spaceship hull made incredibly strong by a force field that can be maintained because it flicks on and off, stroboscopically, eight hundred thousand times a second. "Victory Unintentional," the sequel to "Not Final!," is summarized in Chapter 3.

  At this point in his writing career, Asimov's robot stories were well established and his Foundation stories were beginning to be published. "Nightfall" had given him a cover on Astounding, and he was being published in that magazine with some regularity. He had no reason to believe that he could make a living as a writer, but the writing was a great help to his bank account he was paying his tuition as well as some other expenses although still living at home. In 1942, while he was continuing his graduate work in chemistry at Columbia (having passed on the second try his qualifying examinations to undertake research), he experienced his first dry spell. It was fourteen months before he returned to his typewriter and then only on a limited basis.

  He had good reasons for his temporary abandonment of what had seemed like unimaginable success a year or two before: his research toward his Ph.D. consumed time and energy, he met and fell in love with Gertrude Blugerman, whom five months later he persuaded to marry him, and he applied for and accepted a job at the Naval Air Experimental Station of the U.S. Navy Yard in Philadelphia, where Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp already were at work. After "Author! Author!," which was sold to Astounding's companion fantasy magazine, Unknown, but not published until 1964 in an anthology of Unknown stories because of the magazine's untimely death, and "Death Sentence" (Astounding, November 1943), Asimov wrote only one story during the rest of the war years that was not a Foundation story or a robot story.

  That story was "Blind Alley" (Astounding, March 1945), and, in spite of Asimov's resolve to stay away from areas of dispute with Campbell, it was about aliens. Two aspects of the story, however, must have pleased Campbell: the aliens were non-threatening, a dying race that had specialized in the biological sciences as well as psychology and psychiatry, and once they came into contact with humans (in the period of the thriving Galactic Empire), all the humans' efforts could not keep them from eliminating themselves by voluntarily having no offspring. The other pleasing aspect was the solution to the problem: an opportunity for the aliens to speed off to the Magellanic Clouds and a galaxy of their own was created by a clever bureaucrat who used the turgid bureaucratic channels of communication and methods of operation for his own purposes. That must have appealed to Campbell's conviction that "it's all a matter of knowing how."

  Asimov was busy through the rest of 1944, 1945, and 1946 with robot and Foundation stories. In addition, he was drafted into the Army in September 1945, and released a year later. This period saw him produce "The Mule," "Evidence," "Little Lost Robot," and "Now You See It. . . ." Then he wrote another non-robot, non-Foundation story, "No Connection'' (Astounding, June 1948). It too was about aliens, in this case intelligent bears who have succeeded to the mastery of North America after humanity wiped itself out in atomic wars. But in Europe anthropoids have evolved into a new kind of humanoid civilization and pose a threat, including even atomic warfare, to the peaceful, cooperative ursine civilization. An ursine archeologist, investigating radioactive ruins, finds evidence of a previous human civilization, which he calls "Primate Primeval," but he rejects the notion that any connection would exist between the sordid present of neutron bombardments and the glorious, mysterious past.

  Both "Blind Alley" and "No Connection" were problem stories and were modestly successful insofar as they represented effective problem-solving. After Asimov's first non-fiction article, a research spoof, "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" (Astounding, March 1948), which was important to his future career, A
simov took a gamble on a novella, "Grow Old with Me," for Startling Stories, partly to prove to himself that he was not a one-editor author. Its rejection by Startling and then Astounding was a blow to his writing ambitions. He stopped writing for a year while he completed work on his Ph.D. and accepted a job to do post-doctoral research on anti-malarial drugs.

  Asimov then produced a time-travel paradox story titled "The Red Queen's Race" (Astounding, January 1949), in which a crazed researcher attempts to send back to Hellenistic times a chemical textbook translated into Greek so that the Greeks can build a stronger civilization that will withstand barbarian attacks. After a long effort to undo the action, the assistant professor of philosophy who translated the textbook tells investigators not to worry. The textbook was sent back to this world.