XPost: alt.fan.tolkien, rec.arts.books.tolkien, alt.books.cs-lewis
From: bredband.net@ojevind.lang
"Paul S. Person" skrev i meddelandet
news:gmj8855svkrkn5m383k7f8a7sif2a2udu5@4ax.com...
[snip]
> And then there is /The End of Eternity/, which takes a rather
> different slant on who is responsible for the path that led to the
> Empire.
The one about the agency monitoring time travel against aberrations and
discovering that it was a self-defeating purpose?
[snip]
> I don't know that inferring what Asimov believed from what he wrote is
> necessarily a valid process. He may simply have started the story with
> another goal, and found that the ending wrote itself, a phenomenon
> several authors have reported having occurred to them.
In a collection of his best early stories issued in, I think, the '80s, he
wrote a short introduction before each story, relating something about the
circumstances surrounding its composition. He said about "In a Good
Cause..." that most of the time, but not always, a writer expresses his own
opinions in a story, adding that when he wrote that one, he was so busy
organizing the story that it was only after he had finished it that he
noticed that he disliked its moral, which was that interhuman warfare was a
necessary developmental stage so they could evolve the skills necessary to
defeat humanity's inevitable enemy, the alien Diaboli. He said that another
sf writer (I forget who) told him he liked the story but disliked its moral
and added that he had to admit that that was how he felt about it too.
I agree with both Asimov and his colleague; "In a Good cause..." is a good
story, but the moral is terrible.
[snip]
> In /Foundation's Edge/ or /Foundation and Earth/, Asimov propounds two
> theories:
> 1) That all solar systems look like ours (rocky planets inward,
> gaseous planets outward). This, of course, reflects the state of solar
> system theory before any extra-Solar planets were discovered. (The
> theory developed to explain why this "always" happened may still apply
> to some subset of star systems, of which we happen to be one, of
> course.)
> 2) That intelligent life evolved only on Earth because only Earth had
> a discernable level of background radiation. Asimov's universe, of
> course, is notable for the absence of any other intelligent species
> than Man (Robots are not a species and Gaia is composed of Men and
> Robots) and, in fact, he states that Man never found life very far
> advanced on any planet other than Earth.
I think Asimov lacked the empathy (or whatever one should call it) necessary
to deal with other thinking species in space. Again, I feel a need to
contrast him with Poul Anderson, who glorified in depiciting variegated
human and non-human cultures in space.
> So the nuclear war presumed in the /very/ early novel (the protagonist
> is a 20th-century man transported into the far future, and the Empire
> in this novel knows darn well where Earth is) is replaced by Giskard
> enhancing the one unique feature of Earth, acting under his
> understanding of the Zeroth Law, and self-destructing because of his
> doubts about having acted correctly. The forced evacuation would,
> IIRC, take about 200 years, making it difficult but not impossible.
A nuclear war is also rather clearly assumed to have taken in place on Earth
in "The Stars, Like Dust".
[snip]
> Almost anything that was found on any planet was, ultimately, derived
> from Earth. Certainly any plants or animals (including fish and birds)
> useful to man. Although evolution, no doubt, had its effects!
To me, it feels rather bleak. I'd like to think that there is some other
life in the universe in addition to us.
Öjevind
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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