The Asimov Chronicles

"So I’ll say up front that this book is a little bit hard to find… I wanted to choose a good anthology of his short fiction, which is the best place to start. This is out of print, so if you want to get a copy, you might have to hunt around for a bit. The reason that I wanted to use this book as an entry point is that the obvious place to start with Asimov’s short fiction is I, Robot , a collection of what are called ‘the robot stories’, which are probably his most famous short stories. Those stories are historically important, but they have not aged very well. I think modern readers would have trouble understanding why they were so appealing to people without making a mental adjustment. You can’t ignore them entirely, but I would not recommend people start there. This anthology includes most of the major robot stories, but also other stories that I think are better, more accessible, and which Asimov himself would probably say were better written and more interesting stories than the ones that he became famous for. All you really need to know about the robot stories is what are called ‘the Three Laws of Robotics,’ which laid out the rules by which robots interact with human beings and were developed by Asimov in collaboration with John W. Campbell. These are important concepts. A lot of the stories in the Robot series are based around these rules and the surprising or mysterious ways that robots interpret them. Those are worth knowing because they are famous, both within science fiction and in AI and robotics research, where they are also often cited. The stories themselves usually hinge on a twist, a little surprise ending, based on a clever interpretation of those three laws. The experience of reading the stories is mixed. For a lot of them, if someone just tells you the premise and explains the twist, that is almost as good as reading the story itself. These are early stories for Asimov, and he is not a writer who is particularly concerned by style, by world building, by character – all these things that we associate with science fiction . They aren’t really there in the robot story. That’s why I started with that caveat: even though they’re very famous and important, I would not start there. I would start instead with a couple of stories in this collection. The first is called ‘Nightfall’, and it’s a story that Asimov published in Astounding Science Fiction magazine, the pulp magazine in which most of his major stories appeared. ‘Nightfall’ was a story that turned him from a second-tier writer into someone seen as one of the best science fiction writers in the pulps. He became an acclaimed writer, at least among fans, because of the story ‘Nightfall .’ It’s a story about a planet that has never seen the stars. They have a somewhat complicated solar system with multiple suns, and usually at least one of these suns is in the sky at any given time. Then, every few thousand years, they all set, and the stars become visible. The question of the story is, what would happen if mankind were to see the stars for the first time in, say, a thousand years? The story is very dark. It doesn’t end well, I’ll say. But it’s a very interesting story, a very engaging story, and also pointed out some themes that become important later on. Campbell and Asimov worked on the story together. It points to issues of psychology and the rise and fall of civilizations, which are going to be important… If you’re going to read one thing by Asimov, I’d read ‘Nightfall’. Another story I want to highlight is called ‘The Last Question’, which Asimov would probably have said was his best story. I think at one point he said it was the best science fiction story that he ever wrote, and maybe the best science fiction story that anyone ever wrote. It’s pretty mind-blowing. It’s a story that spans millions of years in just a few pages, and it’s about the problem of, What does humanity do when the universe starts to wind down? Physics tells us that eventually the universe will enter a state of what currently we call ‘heat death’, where entropy has risen to the point where nothing could ever happen again. This is baked into the laws of physics. Is there a way to reverse this process? Is there a way to get out of this inevitable dying close to history? Asimov suggests a solution, which I don’t want to spoil – it’s deservedly famous, and pretty impressive. Yes, this is one of my favourite subjects to talk about! So Asimov, as I said before, was a very famous person during the last half of his life and is an iconic figure. But during the period we’re talking about here, he was a very young man. He was eighteen, I think, when he first met Campbell. They met only because Asimov happened to live in Brooklyn. He could take the train to the Astounding offices in Manhattan, meet Campbell, and give him his latest submissions by hand. It took him a while to break into the magazine. He submitted eight stories before the ninth one was accepted. Campbell I think was twenty-seven when he took over the magazine – so older than Asimov, but not by much – and he saw Asimov as a protégé, and an experiment. Up to that point, most of Campbell’s authors were older writers who had come up from other pulp genres like Westerns or adventure fiction, and they were transferring these stock plots into space. The results could be a little bit formulaic. Asimov was a fan first: he grew up loving the pulps because he could read them in his father’s candy store for free, and so he’d read all these magazines. He was a member of the generation of science fiction fans who wanted to write science fiction for its own sake. They weren’t cynically trying to earn a living by writing stories as some of the other pulp writers were. They really loved the genre for itself and wanted to break into it. So Campbell sees Asimov, this young guy, and says, “What can I use you for? What can I turn you into? You’re eager, you’re smart, you’re still very raw. You’re willing to do pretty much whatever I request.” So he developed Asimov, gradually, and got him to the point where he could start to give him ideas. The Three Laws of Robotics was an idea that came up in their conversations at the Astounding office. Campbell essentially pitched the three laws to Asimov, who then incorporated them into his work. The idea for ‘Nightfall’ was one that Campbell had on his own and gave to Asimov. Asimov said later that he didn’t know whether Campbell had deliberately given him that idea, or if he just happened to be the one writer who showed up at the office that day – and if it had been somebody else, Campbell would have maybe given the idea to a different writer altogether. So that’s the dynamic. When we get to Foundation in a minute, you’ll see how Campbell shaped those stories as well. The first half of Asimov’s career is pretty much shaped by that relationship. Campbell is an incredibly important figure in the history of science fiction. He was very personally intimidating, a dominant, charismatic person in the room. And Asimov was receptive. He was eager, and looking for a mentor figure. So for all these stories that we’re talking about, in this first half of Asimov’s writing career, Campbell is absolutely the unseen, unspoken person who’s shaping a lot of them."