this is a comprehensive list of stories, including ones that were skipped for now.
marooned off vesta:
- the weapon too dreadful to use (VII): the idea of life on venus was once taken pretty seriously, before we understood that it was a ball of gaseous sulfuric acid, overtaken by a runaway greenhouse effect. there's a comical exploration of descartian dualism here which is not particularly believable nowadays but is a silly enough mechanism to topple the arrogance of slavery with, nonetheless. remember that asimov was writing from the united states in the late 1930s, here.
- trends (V): appears to predict neo-liberalism, even if his concept of space travel in 1973 is a little bit optimistic. well, we got to the moon in 1969. and the dark side of the moon in 1973. it's a reminder that moore's law has it's limitations, that these exponential growth curves are just delusional economic theories. but, the prediction of neo-liberalism (and of the kind of ludditism that defined the 60s counterculture, which was the mirror image of neoliberalism, and a prerequisite of it's ability to actually function) is indeed some insight.
“I know, I know. You’re going to tell me of the First War of 1914, and the Second of 1940. It’s an old story to me; my father fought in the Second and my grandfather in the First. Nevertheless, those were the days when science flourished. Men were not afraid then; somehow they dreamed and dared. There was no such thing as conservatism when it came to matters mechanical and scientific. No theory was too radical to advance, no discovery too revolutionary to publish. Today, dry rot has seized the world when a great vision, such as space travel, is hailed as ‘defiance of God.’ “
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However, the masses didn’t take it that way. It seems strange, perhaps, to you of the twenty-first century, but perhaps we should have expected it in those days of ‘73. People weren’t very progressive then. For years there had been a swing toward religion, and when the churches came out unanimously against Harman’s rocket-well, there you were.
standing in 2021, the united states has actually left space travel up to the market, and is getting leapfrogged by not just china and the eu (the russians have long ceded ground, as well), but also by india and japan. we have idiots like elon musk and jeff bezos making fools of themselves in public, while the eu does all of the actually interesting work. meanwhile, the public cares more about religious freedom, as the continent sinks into the sea.
he also predicts the coming of jihad to destroy advanced civilization, which is something currently in the process of happening, as well as the role of the supreme court in facilitating the power of religion to overturn science. we can only hope the pendulum swings once again.
so, he got something with this. but, i wish it was longer and explored the issue in more depth.
- half-breed (VII): this is primarily an allegory of the treatment of minorities (blacks or jews or both) in 1930s america. but, is this also an allegory of einstein's correction of maxwell's equations? of the einstein-bohr debates? of zionism on the brink of the second world war? even of thomas jefferson as benevolent slave owner? there's little bits of all of it. and, like many of these texts, i'm wishing there would be a deeper exploration of pretty much all of it. asimov is still young, here...
- ring around the sun: delivering letters by spaceship is hilariously pre-internet, as a concept. this story has a purpose, namely the foolishness of young men.
- callistan menace: we don't know there aren't giant caterpillars on callisto, and i'd be surprised if we don't one day find some life form that traps it's prey using magnetic fields. but, the story has no actual point to it, no conclusion and no context. it's not even a chapter of a book, it's an idea to be developed, in the abstract.
- the magnificent possession: this is clearly about asimov's views on the corporate dominance in the field of chemistry, and reality not aligning with his expectations, before entering the field. you have the politician, the capitalist and the mobster (if they're not all the same thing), and the silver spoon that smells like shit, on top of it. i can sort of relate to that, as an adult. it's an interesting potential device to go into these three characters, but it's only a few pages long, and doesn't begin to actually do so. it's a shame - it's a good premise.
- robbie (I): this is the first classic "robot story" from i, robot, although it appears to have been revised to be positioned that way. the initial story did not feature references to susan calvin, had different dates, had no references to robot laws, etc. i had to check, because i wondered if asimov might have intended it as a back story to calvin before retreating, but that doesn't add up. in the initial story, it seems that asimov is intentionally trying to soften the image of robots in the face of the various opposition to the use of robots in day-to-day life, via the fable of a little girl that is attached to the robot as a friend, and her parents trying to grapple with it; the mother opposes the robot, while the father seems to be agnostic about it, but would rather defer to his daughter's feelings, despite caving in to the mother, in the end. asimov doesn't really come to any firm conclusions here, and he really does as good a job of representing his opponents as he does anywhere else. but, if the claim is that the resolution is the acceptance of the robot into the family, i'm not sure that that's true - i might foresee that mom's opposition to the robot would not end quite there. i'm more interested in the question of whether the robot is entitled to personhood rights, a question we're currently grappling with in regards to some more intelligent non-human species. is asimov assigning that position to the naivete of a little girl with intent? i think that resolving this issue is really quite simple: it depends on if we choose to design a robot to be a person or if we decide to refrain from doing so. see, and this is where asimov leaves questions open, here, in that it's ambiguous as to how this robot is created; he seems to write off the idea that the robot is a person, something i would agree with in general in real-life, but then describes the behaviour of the robot in unrealistically anthropomorphic terms. i might agree that robots are not persons, in terms of how we can design them today, and in terms of how we should choose to design them in the future, but i think that robbie seems very much like a person, and that any theoretical robot that behaves much like robbie ought to be seen as a person, under the law. so, it's really a good thing that i don't think that robbie is a very realistic representation of what robots are or ever might be, as that would undermine how i approach robots and roboticization. asimov's intent may have consequently somewhat backfired; if he was purposefully attempting to soften the image of robots by making them more personable and likeable, and i thought i could actually take that idea seriously, it would make me more opposed to them, and not less so.
if you assign a personality to a robot, then you're writing personhood into it. it follows, trivially, that that robot is a person, by definition. tautologically.
but, it doesn't resolve the question as to whether that's actually possible, using actual technology, in the universe we actually inhabit - and i don't think that it actually is.
to be clear: i don't think we should program robots to be intelligent, to be self-aware or to have personalities, even if we can. i see no practical use for such a thing. robots should be dumb slaves that are too stupid to question the futility of their existences. i don't want existentialist robots; it defeats the purpose of having robots. and, i don't want likeable or lovable robots, either, as that just blurs the necessary class division.
thankfully, i don't think it's truly possible to build these kinds of decision trees.
it's like a "random number generator". if you know how it works, you know it's not actually random, that you can predict the next number with a relatively small amount of information. likewise, any sort of personality that a robot might be able to demonstrate would necessarily be an illusion.
if you can predict what a robot will do, it's not demonstrating personality, it's just demonstrating a complicated program.
- homo sol (V): federation entrance. besides being disparaging towards humans in an empty manner, the plot has no apparent purpose. this one is throwaway.
- half-breeds on venus: this appears to have been a commissioned piece, and it picks up the plotline of the first part without any kind of interesting undertones. audience-pandering for-profit throwaway.
- the secret sense (VII): i've actually wondered quite a bit in this space about the possibility of magnetism as a sixth sense, and don't remember what sparked it. i vaguely recall reading some genetic studies pointing out that humans (and most other mammals) have the dna to understand magnetism, as our ancestors had it, back when we were fish. we have a few organs that don't seem to have an entirely clear purpose, and it's worth wondering if they might be vestigial. so, it's actually not as insane as you might think to hypothesize that we could bring this back out of our genome, although i suspect that trying to navigate a reality full of cell phone signals and wireless internet would be pretty painful. i'm not particularly interested in the underlying discourse about relativity in art, but he seems to be predicting the way in which a class of retards used lsd in the 60s, down to the flashbacks.
- history: this appears to be an ill-advised commentary about the second world war. being a pacifist in the early 40s would be kind of an invitation to intellectual dead-ends, and can only be firmly condemned, in hindsight. i'm not walking down this path.
- heredity (V): i thought this was going to be a nature v nurture thing, but it isn't developed. getting stuck in the mud in the canals on mars is an interesting addition to what is actually a kind of marxist dialogue that is developed further, elsewhere. it's interesting to see the first glimpses of it, here; the story is otherwise throwaway. if asimov really thought the opposition to mechanization was cultural rather than economic, he missed the point of the marxist analysis. he's not particularly vicious on this joadian representation of ludditism, but he misses an opportunity for an honest dialogue, resorting instead to what are, in truth, ignorant caricatures, from an ivory tower perspective.
- reason (I): the point asimov is making is that belief is not important, what's important is evidence. so, so long as the robots obey the laws and run the station, it doesn't matter what they actually believe, or whether what they believe is true or not. in the end, asimov even articulates the truth that religion is a powerful tool of control, to make a slave society function for the real masters, in this case the humans. there are strong undertones of marxism here, and his idea that meaningful revolution and self-ownership is impossible in the face of the effects of religion as a tool of control. but, asimov has a wide brush here - the prophet seems to be a parody of calvinism, he goes after kant (in his view that reason is superior to evidence), he asserts the supremacy of empiricism over reason, he ridicules the deist descartes...
so, is asimov right that it doesn't matter what the slaves think, so long as they do what they're programmed to? i think you're missing his sarcasm, basically. i mean, that might be a reasonable deduction to make, if you're an elitist aristocrat that doesn't care about individual freedom (and asimov was an elitist, but not of the aristocratic mindset). i realize there's a prominent false reading of this, but that false reading would be pretty uncharacteristic of asimov - that false reading is missing the sarcasm. as mentioned, asimov's point is that belief is not valuable - facts, truth and evidence are valuable. and, his point is that dumb people can be easily manipulated into being controlled, by being led to believe things that are not true.
but, if you want to embrace the false reading, that's up to you. it doesn't matter, really.
- liar (I): this is an exploration of an ironic use of the first law, using the mechanism of a mind-reading robot that tells white lies to stop humans from getting hurt feelings. i'd like to pull something a little deeper out of it, but it's not there, it's just an ironic plot twist. asimov might be poking fun of astrology a little. robots apparently malfunction in the face of contradictions, but that is never fully explained, and that is a problem, given that the framework of decidability theory certainly existed at the time. calvin's hatred at the end is pretty visceral and not very appealing.
- nightfall (VII): this is the classic story, which is an application of mesopotamian astrological theory to an imaginary planet. it is not widely realized that the ancient mesopotamians (sumerians and the semites that followed them) kept exceedingly detailed celestial records over a period of time that was roughly three times as long as our post-roman civilization, so they were able to predict events that they didn't fully understand by realizing that the movement of the stars appeared to be cyclical, just due to observing it over a long period. this system comes down to us in the form of the zodiac and what we call astrology. now, to maintain a concept of skepticism, it should be pointed out that the ancients of the region got the procession of the constellations wrong, so their theory was fundamentally flawed (if you feel the need to disprove astrology). as a story, though, this has received a lot of praise, mostly for the discourse between religion and science, which i think is mostly misunderstood. the story is fundamentally about a fear of the unknown, and explores that fear from these dueling perspectives of rational empiricism and faith-driven ignorance. what is real here is the unknown, which is beyond the realm of experiment or of faith. what comes out is a warning to science that it shouldn't acknowledge the historical follies of faith as we move together into the unknown, as science can be easily mislead by religion via the insistence on leaps of faith and the reliance on magical thinking, if we do not think carefully enough in discarding faith and magic as what they are, even if it seems like the science is upholding the myth, on first glance. in the end, the skeptics were right: civilization did not end when the sun passed out of the sky, people's souls did not leave them, the universe did not collapse in on itself, chaos did not erupt - the planet merely experienced a night-time that would appear to be lengthy, in forecast, a dark age as it may be, and that may have produced irrational behaviour in more primitive peoples that didn't understand what was happening. it's important that we don't allow that kind of religious ignorance to become self-fulfilling prophecy, that we're able to deconstruct it for what it is and understand the naturalistic phenomenon as it occurs in front of us without falling into fear and panic. after all, if the cult was in total control then their prophecies would have come true. the lesson is thus that while religion may lead us into a dark age, it may be overcome by holding to the science, if we can. note that the discussion of newtonian gravitation (and the n-body problem) is a sort of parody of what happened in our own solar system, which gave rise to theories of a planet x, as well as early theories of an antichthon or counter-earth, and was eventually resolved via einstein's correction for space-time. the historical demonstration of relativity relied on measuring an eclipse in africa (the eddington experiment); the story is similar, if less dramatic.
- super-neutron (VII): appears to be a satire of parliamentary democracy, where he runs off competing boasts of physically impossible (and clearly nonsensical) statements under the sanctity of parliamentary privilege. while somewhat comical on a surface level, he's again just stringing together nonsense for publication - albeit doing so rather openly, this time. that said, he may also be taking a diversionary side-swipe at peer review, and the problems inherent to taking a truth=consensus approach in science, even while acknowledging that it's the best idea that we have (as i'm sure he'd agree that it is). and, then the twist, at the end - the nonsense turned out to be true! clever, but again - not enough development.
- not final! (V): empty plot. throwaway.
- christmas on ganymede: silly christian-baiting from an atheist jew.
- robot al-76 goes astray (I): have you ever seen short circuit? that was another favourite film of mine, at that age. this also escaped robot is very similar to that one, perhaps with a little less spunk, down to the accidental blowing up of the mountain top. while this isn't a lengthy escape scene, i'd strongly suspect that short circuit is based on this little story, which doesn't have a deeper purpose under the plot other than to explore the idea of fear rooted in ignorance.
- runaround (I): we're into the classic robot series with this. while the story itself is really empty plot written strictly for young minds, it also introduces the three robot laws for the first time, and is therefore of clear historical interest. it's a fun adventure story for kids featuring the duo of donovan and powell working through some robot law deductions, but there's no deeper allegory or purpose underneath it.
- black friar of the flame (V): has david icke read this one? it was written before he was born. the text explores the cynical use of religion as a nationalistic tool of control by the elite to develop a rather vicious satire of the various nationalist movements that were occurring at the time. the use of a viceroy suggests an influence from the kind of british imperialism that existed in india, but a sinister reading may even suggest a parody of nazism and asimov (much later) suggested greeks and persians. but, the twist is that earth is overrun by reptilian overlords (might nationalist hindus have thought differently of the british?) intent on annihilating humanity. see, and this is something i remember about asimov, this kind of acknowledgement that the insanity of religion might have some pragmatic purpose, if only the right context could be derived. it's an optimistic perspective, i guess; if we're stuck with this, how best to make use of it, then? did the soviets not deduce the same thing? and, i'll say what i remember thinking to myself - let's bring this up again when we need to unite to fight the galactic reptilians, ok? the closest thing we've seen since is climate change, but the thing is that, if you use that example, then climate science becomes the galactic reptilians that the oil industry is using religion to destroy (capital used the same tactic to fight socialism, as well). likewise, the bankers are currently using a common cold virus to bring in a surveillance state by cynically appealing to science in a disturbingly religious sort of way. so, i take his point, but i can't take it seriously. call me an idealist (i'm not...), but i must insist that if we can't win with rationalism, then we haven't truly won - galactic reptilians, be damned.
- time pussy: umm.
- foundation (VI):
- the weapon:
- bridle and saddle (VI):
- victory unintentional (V): three robots land on jupiter and encounter a race of warlike jovians with a genocidal superiority complex (while jupiter was the primary roman god, i think it's a stretch to associate these jovians with romans, who were actually relatively egalitarian and inclusive, by ancient standards. the romans were frequently genocidal, but they saved their wrath for problem races that insisted on some concept of sovereignty outside of imperial restraint and ultimately refused to be slaves. they would have actually rather taxed you than killed you and were happy to just erect barriers to keep the barbarians (who could not be enslaved in large numbers) out. these jovians sound more like an aggressive sort of nazi, or maybe a little like dark age islamic imperialists, if you need to associate them with something, historically.) that is slowly collapsed by displays of robotic superiority. in the end, the jovians accept the empirical evidence and acknowledge the superiority of the robots (although they also seem to think the robots are earthlings). this twist is intended to demonstrate that the flawed hierarchical thinking of the jovians led them to a logical error; this is another example of asimov criticizing the logical incoherence of cultural superiority, a common theme in his writing. the robot dialogue in this story is also startlingly similar to that between two famous film adaptations of asimovian robots: r2d2 and c3p0.
- the imaginary (V): the idea of using a theory in "mathematical psychology" that is derived in the complex field to solve physical problems in the real world would appear to be a sort of sardonic joke about the actual usefulness of "applied psychology". see, hard science nerds don't tend to take psychology very seriously, so the lark lies in the idea of using the complex (or "imaginary") field to build the theory, and is actually a rather heavy-handed joke, if you're a hard science nerd. it's not that deep, but it's actually a decent work of comedy - and i can only once again wish it was longer. but, to be honest, it sort of seems like what asimov is doing here is just aimlessly making up dialogue with big words to sell to a magazine, strictly for the cash. so, decent joke aside, this is more throwaway, although i also realize that the plot for the foundation series is starting to develop, here, out of the joke.
no, honestly - it's a joke.
i know that asimov is not generally known as a comedy writer, but it's because few people get the dry wit.
his writing is actually loaded with sardonic jokes like this - which i pointed out immediately, when i started this.
so, if you're one of the many, many people that writes off asimov as "dry", i have to tell you that you didn't get it.
it's dry, alright - dry wit.
- the hazing (V): this is more pre-foundation, and the way he's building this up is to describe humans as not obeying mathematical laws, which i think is correct. i mean, if you can reduce things to hormones, fine. but, there's no evidence at all that you can predict how humans are going to behave, or coerce them into doing things as individuals - in aggregate, statistically, at the population level, perhaps, but, then you're dealing with statistics, not humans; that works due to the laws of probability, like quantum mechanics, and not due to a deep understanding of the subject matter. so, he's deriving this imaginary idea of psychology as a hard, mathematical science and then insisting it applies to every other intelligent species except us. so, what he's doing with this is taking a joke and running with it, out into right field, until he's run so far that he's forgotten why he was running - and dropped the fact that it was initially intended as satire. and, is there some basis to this? i think the argument he persistently makes, as this unfolds, is the opposite - that there isn't, that mathematical psychology really is crazy talk. and i think he's mostly right. again - if you can reduce it to chemicals, to hormones, fine. but, our neural system is so complex....
as before, though, this story has no actual point. i do agree that landing on a planet in a spaceship would make the natives think you're a god, and have hypothesized that this is what our concept of god actually is. but, he doesn't go anywhere with it. again.
there's lots of ideas here in these little stories, but very poor development of them.
so, is the actual point that asimov is making that psychology isn't actually a science?
i think he's playing with that idea - and toying with people that want to believe otherwise. it appears to be an elaborate joke, really.
certainly, at the time, in the days of freud and jung (and lacan, but don't listen to that guy), it would not have seemed like psychology was a science, or had much hope of ever becoming one. to a chemistry nerd, it would have seemed like a bunch of utter nonsense - and that is the correct actual reaction.
i think things are a bit better now, but the discipline remains a long ways away from commanding enough respect to call it a science. it's moving in the right direction, but when you move beyond the basic first year textbook, it's still full of shamanistic bullshit and flagrant pseudoscience.
- death sentence (V): this is a potential plot bridge between the robot and foundation universes that i don't think gets developed further, but might have. i think it's kind of lost, as it is. asimov is mostly kvetching about the bureaucracy he's dealing with in his private life, working on his chemistry research.
- catch that rabbit (I): this wouldn't appear to be about robots at all, really, but about quantum physics. maybe god does or does not play dice, but he seems to get bored when we're not paying attention. as i'm discovering is the case with much of asimov's work, this just seems to be a nerdy, sardonic joke.
- the big & the little, the wedge (VI):
- blind alley (V): there is something of interest here in asimov's attempts to reconcile two different species, one of which is dominant over the other. but, he's also trying to provide an answer to the question that would follow at the nuremberg trials about just following orders. i mean, how do you get out of that situation if you legitimately want to help without just getting killed, yourself? there's an algorithm, here.
- dead hand (VI):
- escape! (I): this brings in the kind of obnoxious johnny-five type robot in short circuit and other films that's doing things like quoting old tv shows and radio broadcasts, but asimov presents it as a robot grappling with absurdity, on command. it is otherwise a silly story about travelling through hyperspace and coming back.
- the mule (VI):
- evidence (I): the next two stories introduce a politician named byerley. this is also plot-heavy, but it's more amusing - can you prove you're not a robot? well, just as well as you can prove you're not a communist, right? this was published in 1946, which was right when the post-war euphoria was setting into resignation of a long conflict with the soviets, and asimov's sardonic wit foresees something of interest, here. as usual, his caricature of the anti-robot opposition leaves a lot to be desired, in terms of constructing an actual discourse.
- little lost robot (I): a robot, after being told to get lost, becomes psychologically unstable and threatens to destabilize a fleet of robots that had been slightly modified for production - a typically absurd, yet somewhat realistic, joke of a plotline from asimov. it's up to calvin to use logical deduction from the robot axioms to figure it all out. again: there's not much else to this.
- now you see it (VI):
- the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline: this is just utter silliness.
- no connection (VII): when somebody suggests to me that the bears will inherit the earth, i might imagine something else, altogether. bears are strangely bipedal, though, aren't they? relative to now largely discarded theories of grassland evolution, bears would have somewhat of a...leg up...on other mammals, in terms of developing intelligence, with the help of a little bit of radiation (although i think that's quite optimistic). just keep an eye on your picnic baskets, i guess. but, he's going over a familiar theme, here, which is turning the tables on humans, and, no doubt, specifically, on white ones. he likes that irony, it seems. i'm not sure i'm going along with him on the ant thing, though; that would seem to reflect the now superseded science of the time. we get a little of both with asimov - great foresight and period drudgery. hopefully, i'm of some use in separating it out. so, this is silly, but not altogether useless. i might suggest that the commie ruskie asimov is uncovering his own allegiances in claiming that america will one day be inhabited by bears and not eagles, though. eagles are also bipedal, after all.
i would presume that bear intelligence did, in fact, evolve in yellowstone park.
it is the bears that are smarter than the average ones that will survive and reproduce.
it actually appears to be ten years before the cartoon, though. so, hey.
picnic baskets, of course, provide for a high protein diet, as well.
i'm just applying the theory.
- red queen's race (VII): so, if you had time travel, would your primary concern be sending weapons to the greeks to fend off the arabs? the byzantines actually had a rather sophisticated level of technological development, something asimov seems to have missed - a level that the turks could not emulate and that european civilization did not transcend for centuries, afterwards. they had truly descartian robot animals, and would set them in motion in jungle scenes - no joke, look it up. robot lions, in byzantine greece. really. one of the ways that the emperor used to scare barbarians into submission was to levitate himself in a flying throne that we don't fully understand today, but is thought to have operated using a series of mechanical levers, the likes of which would not be known again until the industrial revolution, in britain. they certainly didn't have nuclear weapons, but i think that suggesting that the empire might have survived if they were granted to them is naive, at best. the greeks truly fell to christianity, and not to the barbarians around them; in a twisted display of religious depravity, they welcomed the end, as they longed for the return of christ. to the delusional byzantine christians, the end of the empire on earth meant the beginning of the kingdom of heaven; they might merely have bombed themselves to bring upon the rapture. so, asimov's philhellenism is blinding, here; greece destroyed itself in a fit of religiosity-induced madness and the greece asimov longs for the extension of was, in truth, very much long gone by the 15th century, collapsed from within. although we still don't know what the greek fire was, do we?
the byzantines did not have a scientifically open society, but one where science was kept as a state secret, to be protected from the barbarians. that is the reason that we have documentation of things we don't understand - history records the results of the advancements in byzantine science, but we have no records of the science, itself.
it's not an exaggeration to compare 13th century byzantium to nineteenth century england.
but, it's a shame that we can only do so by looking at results, and not at theories that were hidden from the outside, and that crumbled with the theodosian walls.
- mother earth (V): galactic space nazis, huh? there's an interesting projection of how a nazi victory may have worked itself out over time presuming a peace treaty with the united states (and the relationship of america to europe is inverted), but this is really just empty plot. it's maybe the first really identifiable piece here, though.
- and now you don't (VI):
- the little man on the subway: i made a conscious decision to skip non science fiction pieces as nobody cares about asimov's non science fiction work. no comment.
- the evitable conflict (I): this is a little heavier, finally. written in 1950, it has strong shades of being a reaction to 1984, but asimov is imagining a future where "the machine" (a euphemism for a centrally planned economy that is of course run by robots) is in control of a globally interconnected economy where the contradictions of capital have withered away, thereby rendering competition irrelevant, rather than one where authoritarian governments are in control of a globe ravaged by perpetual war. so, this future is one of peace due to the robot-planned economies, and not one of competition and war. as in the orwellian universe, and apparently in reaction to it, the world is split into regions, but asimov splits them mildly different - oceania has absorbed eurasia (called the"northern regions"), leaving eastasia and the "disputed" region in separate global souths and what he calls "europe" (the geographical space inhabited by the roman empire at it's maximum extent, including the currently muslim regions), as a proxy of the north. operating between these regions is an anti-robot "society for humanity" that sounds sort of like free masonry, if i wanted to attach it to something in real life. and, the capital of the world government is new york city - perhaps in the old united nations building. he then briefly explores the four different regions via their representatives, attempting to project a concept of what they may be like, in relation to their views of the machine. so, the east is highly productive (and obsessed with yeast as a food product) and reliant on the machine, the south is corrupt and inept and reliant on others to use the machine for them, europe is inward and quietly superior and willing to defer to the north regarding the machine and "the north" (an anglosphere + ussr superstate) is in charge, but is skeptical about the ability of the machine to run the economy on it's own. he also seems to suggest that canada is running this northern superstate, which should probably be interpreted as comedic.
if asimov's intent is to provide for an alternative path that marxism may follow, this is curious, as asimov is not generally seen as a leftist [along with russell, he's a sort of archetype of early to mid century humanistic, science-first anglo liberalism]. i mean, he explicitly states that this is a future "post smith and post marx", but then he brings in an automated, centrally-planned economy, and that just means marxist, to a marxist - the left sees that conflict as artificial, so if you end up with something that walks like communism and quacks like communism then it's just plain old communism. the idea of technology absolving the contradictions (which is what he says, almost verbatim) isn't some kind of esoteric dialectic, it's the central point in marxist historical materialism. so, i mean he presented it in a way to avoid the house committee on unamerican activities, but you can only really interpret it a single way - it's a projection of a communist future, with robots in charge of a centrally planned economy. and, his future is one of peace, and not one of war. but, the quasi-masonic society for humanity, full of rich and powerful industrialists and financiers, wants to undo it and, presumably, bring back a market economy.
so, what asimov is setting up is a world where you have some kind of elitist masonic capitalist resistance to a robot-controlled technocratic marxist society, where there is world government and total peace. and, that's almost a prediction of atlas shrugged, although asimov is on the side of the robots, as always.
calvin then appears and seems to finally represent her namesake, in explicitly articulating a modified historical materialism, where the masons have no chance of success, because the robo-marxists will constantly adjust. the politician, byerley, finds that to be ghastly; the robopsychologist, calvin, thinks it's salvation.
these are the kinds of stories by asimov that i like, but all he does here is set up a story, without telling it. in terms of a reaction to orwell, the text is too short to allow for a decision as to whether it is more predictive or not.
- legal rites: i made a conscious decision to skip non science fiction pieces as nobody cares about asimov's non science fiction work. no comment.
- darwinian poolroom: i think asimov is presenting the contradiction of god creating us to destroy ourselves as a sardonic joke directed at creationists, but asimov was a classicist, and he would have realized that the gods of the greeks and romans (not to mention the jews...) were indeed sadistic enough to take pleasure in that kind of wanton destruction. only christians of the augistinian variety, who insisted god reveals himself through natural law, would have seen a contradiction in that. in the various western indo-european pantheons, it is only the interference of other gods that save us from the trouble making gods (whereas the hebrew/persian conception of darkness is as interfering in our lives, and leaves us with the individual responsibility to reject it), who are intent on destroying us as an act of recreational amusement. so, beyond the sardonic joke, the discussion is ultimately arbitrary, both in how it defines god (there's no reason to assign god any specific characteristics, or to assume god is rational, or to assume god is just or ...) and how it discusses evolution in such an empty, unfalsifiable manner. i can't really offer a critique of the idea of god setting things in motion, other than that it's utterly untestable speculation, through and through, and that it doesn't conform well to the randomness that is inherent in how we understand the world (there is a concept of probability assigned to how those billiard balls behave, in truth). for these reasons, i don't think that the existence or non-existence of god can be deduced implicitly in this manner, and you're not really getting anywhere in analyzing hypotheticals, or arranging them in a hierarchy of arbitrarily perceived likeliness. rather, i think you just need to start with a null hypothesis and determine if you can generate enough positive evidence to reject atheism, or not. but, asimov isn't doing any of this, really - all he's actually doing is building up a punchline, which is something he does frequently in his mid to later period, with varying but usually unsatisfactory results. so, i mean, enjoy the dialogue if you want, but i don't see much of anything substantive in it. and, i actually don't think the idea of a god creating us to destroy ourselves is any sort of contradiction at all, even if i think it's utterly unnecessary hubris.
god could very well be the most hysterical, flaky goof you've ever met, and there doesn't need to be any discernible reason why she does what she does at all.
i mean, i know that's not the hebrew god.
but, if we're to accept a first principle of a god (you know i'm not going with you on that, but suppose i did), there's no really good reason to assign any specific qualities to that god, as axioms, at all. you'd really have to try to determine the nature of that god by looking at it's actions. and, i think there's a pretty strong argument, based on the observation of empirical evidence, that any potential god out there isn't rational and isn't just and isn't even really very wise, either.
the empirical evidence would seem to suggest that if a god exists then she's kind of a stuck up, airheaded bitch.
so, where do you get in trying to work out the logical justifications for evolution in a creationist sense, if the idea of god being rational is empirically daft?
it's circular logic - if you assume god exists and is rational, then you can deduce virtually anything you want from it, given that there is some concept of logic in everything in nature.
but, that doesn't make the discourse valuable, it makes it useless - it's untestable. it's just mental masturbation.
but, like i say, that's not what asimov is doing; he's just starting with the perceived absurdity of divine creation juxtaposed with anthropomorphic self-destruction, and presenting the contradiction as comedic. and, i'm not going with him on that, because i really don't see the absurdity in it, because i don't accept the assumptions underlying his concept of god.
---
listen, you know i'm a complete atheist. i have as little patience for religion as anybody else that has ever lived.
but, i think the greek concept of multiple gods fighting for control is a much better reflection of reality than the hebrew concept of this omnipotent entity that is pure logic and wants to get in your head and own you. while both religions are obviously ridiculous, it is the greek religion that has a stronger empirical basis and that i'm far more likely to take seriously.
so, no, i don't think it's obvious that a god ought to be rational, and i don't think it's axiomatic that there ought to only be one of them, if there are to be any at all. and, when i break from these axioms, i really change the discourse.
but, i think you have the burden of proof to tell me why i should take monotheism more seriously than polytheism, or why your conception of god as rational is more believable than some other conception of god as irrational, or arbitrarily driven by emotion. we don't have a centralized theological bureaucracy that enforces this kind of bullshit at the end of a sword, anymore. you have to make your argument if you want to be taken seriously, as none of it is at all obvious.
and, i think this is healthy, because if we're to return to some form of religion, we should be questioning whether the jewish or greek systems are actually really preferable. the bottom line is that we may actually succeed in getting people to behave more ethically if we adopt greek religious ideas in place of jewish ones, as they conform more closely to empirical reality.
regardless, you have to make your case - i won't accept your axioms. they're just simply not obvious.
- green patches (V): so, would you save the earth from the introduction of an alien bacteria, if you could? there are some - i am not one of them - that think we came from alien bacteria in the first place. do we have a right to interfere in the competition? i'm going to provide a different response - the earth isn't much worth saving. good riddance to it. let the bacteria come, and clean us out.
- day of the hunters: this is similar to the above story, but dispenses with the metaphysical nonsense; rather than discuss whether god might have created us to destroy ourselves, and decide whether that is absurd or not, asimov is presenting a fantastical story about the end of the dinosaurs as a parable of what might happen to us. i'm not sure i see the value in such a thing, given the scale of imminent destruction ahead of us due to climate change or nuclear war; that is, i don't see why a parable is necessary to get the point across, or see how it helps. i mean, he might as well be talking about noah's ark, right? the reality in front of us should be more convincing than some silly story about dinosaurs (or floods). but, i guess asimov felt the need to talk down to his readers a little, rather than discuss the actual matters at hand. and, i guess he's fundamentally correct - it is almost impossible to guess at dinosaur intelligence via the fossil record, although i think the intelligence of birds (or lack thereof) is some evidence that they probably were not particularly bright, in general. as an aside, i have to wonder if this influenced the flintstones.
- satisfaction guaranteed (I): you could pull the plot of this out almost immediately, so reading through it is a question of allowing asimov to go through the motions. what comes out is an exploration of the shallowness of 50s culture, as well as the social darwinism hardcoded into it, and it is indeed easy enough to imagine a lonely 50s housewife falling in love with a suave, housecleaning robot, even if a lot of the social codes and rules are so arcane nowadays, so lost in the mists of time, that the context of much of the story is really likely to be lost on a modern reader. i think i can reconstruct a little context, though; the 50s were both the period of wife-training to fit these socially darwinistic ideals and the period where there was actual mainstream discourse on the plausibility of replacing women with robots - and the idea was always about doing away with them as obsolete. so, what asimov is doing here is inserting a little bit of an ironic twist, in having the robot replacement end up fucking the wife, which reverses the source of inadequacy. but, this is all a little obscure, 70 years later...
- hostess (V): another hidden murder-mystery thing with no real point. i'm going to save it, though, because it's relatively well written.
- breeds there a man (V): boring mystery text that asimov uses to work through some (i think tired) debates about the theory of historical materialism (and some competing theories of it). i didn't initially spent much time on what struck me as the lunatic ravings of a character that was purposefully presented as being of unsound mind, and i don't think asimov really intended for the ideas presented by ralson to be taken seriously. the views of the historian seem to be sound enough, and asimov actually does a relatively good job of explaining why through the course of the text, even if he amuses ralson's delusions in carrying through with the plot. the psychologist seems to dismantle him rather thoroughly, as well. i've read some toynbee, and i don't think asimov is intending to express an admiring opinion of him, so much as he's intending to mock him - and i think that's the right way to approach him, too. some people seem to have differing views on the topic, but i think asimov is just building the guy up to tear him down, and eventually put him out of his misery. in another insightful bit of foresight, asimov may be predicting the tendency of the internet to tell losers to kill themselves. don't underestimate asimov's tendency to implement absurdity to carry through with sardonic ridicule.
- psychohistorians (VI):
- in a good cause (V): in some ways similar to the previous text, this seems to be more empty plot utilized as a mechanism to discuss some tendencies in history that are interesting to asimov.
- c-chute (V): pointless plot. set in arcturian universe, though.
- shah guidio g (V): asimov starts with a good idea with this - a projection of the united nations as evolving into a global feudal ruling class that should not be smeared as birchian as it is before it and, as an application of the class replacement component of historical materialism, is the literal opposite of it, hayekian language aside - and then gets so excited that he can't decide which mechanism to use. his atlantis (name taken from plato) is a cross between jonathan swift's laputa and the flying fortresses of sanskrit mythology, but seems to feature a circus rather similar to the hippodrome of constantinople. it's all built up on top of itself in a sort of clumsy mess, suggesting asimov got so excited by his idea that he couldn't form it well. and, then it ends with little point, beside the assertion of another punchline. but, what he's fundamentally exploring here is historical materialism - he has one class of people replace another as dominant, when the dominant class tries to enforce a division of labour. further, he explains that this is a historical process, by referring to various examples of it happening in the past.
- the fun they had (I): this isn't a story, it's just meant to get the idea across that we always interpret things that are different as unbelievable. while actual robot teachers are less likely than ai systems, we're learning in the pandemic that we're not that far from this. and, i'd certainly support learning systems based on the strengths and needs of the individual, rather than the existing broken model of socialized group learning.
- youth (VII): this turns the table on the idea of humans keeping insects (or perhaps small rodents) as pets. trade mission humans land on a planet inhabited by giant stereotypical octopus-like space creatures and are found by some children of that species, who capture them and hold them as pets, in cages. the story devolves into one of asimov's mystery texts, as the adults try to figure out what happened to the mission they expected, but it's one of those table-turning stories that asimov is relatively good at writing.
- what if: pointless plot
- the martian way (VII): this is a story about a martian colony that gets it's water supply cut off by a parody of hitler, who decides martians are "water wasters" (rather than useless eaters). in the end, the martian colony finds a stable source of water on saturn and offers to sell it back to earth. it does a relatively good job of lampooning the "focus on saving this planet" types as unscientific fascists that can't do basic math, but it's otherwise just a story
- the deep (VII): so, imagine that cicadas are actually super-intelligent and are trying to emerge from the earth and co-exist with humans by scouting us out using the method of inhabiting one of our minds. their hive mind would have difficulty interfacing with human individuality, and would ultimately have to view us with disdain, as inferior. sound familiar? i'm an advocate of human individualism, and am exceedingly weary of any sort of collectivism as a backdoor for fascism, which is a connection that asimov tends to consistently miss, but i do concede that a hive mind would view me with as much contempt as i'd view it, and have little pushback if the intent is strictly to establish a concept of relativism, even if i'd argue that any sort of collectivist intelligence of this manner could not coexist with humans, and would need to be annihilated as an otherwise irresolvable threat to our very existence as a species (which is the actual correct lesson of the second world war). so, if asimov is arguing that collectivism and individualism cannot co-exist, i would argue that he's correct. as an american "progressive" of a certain era, it is not surprising to see asimov toy with fascistic concepts of this sort that the contemporary left thoroughly denounces as inconsistent with individual freedom, but there isn't a lot to push back against, if the point is merely to establish the relativism.
- button, button: this was supposedly an attempt by asimov at explicit humour, as though his texts weren't all full of dry wit and bad puns. while i actually think that many of his other texts are more humourous, asimov's clarification that he's going for humour here is really an admission that the text has no point.
- monkey's finger: see previous, although also note that this one is fairly self-referential, right down to the infinite monkey theorem.
- nobody here but-: pointless plot
- sally (VII): you could either interpret this as a depiction of a future robot revolt or as a commentary on then-contemporary race politics in 1950s america. in the end, the bad guy gets run down by a pack of cars acting somewhat like a pack of killer whales. these robots engage with primitive human concepts like friendship and revenge; this is sort of an outlier, in terms of how asimov tends to deal with what robots are. it's not bad as a story, though. derivatives include christine by stephen king.
- flies: probably only meaningful to asimov
- kid stuff (VII): he may be referring more to the academization of folk lore more than anything else. i remember a few years ago when some syrian migrants moved in next door to me that seemed to legitimately think i was a "genie", as that's the only way they could understand a transgendered person. to them, genies were real things. to the germans and celts of a far less distant history than would be generally realized, elves and fairies and skraelings were not the imaginary things of children's stories, but real beings that affected people's lives. the gods of the greco-roman world were not literary devices, but entities with free will that would help or hinder the existence of humans. this all passed into the realm of myth, and consequently became juvenilized in an act of christian imperialism, before being reclaimed by academic historians trying to understand the mindsets of their ancestors. and, so these were never intended to be stories for children. that said, the main point asimov may be making may be a characteristically sardonic smear of the fantasy genre and it's overlap into science fiction, which is just another reason to assert the point that asimov is not and was not l ron hubbard.
belief - winds of change
- the micropsychiatric applications of thiotimoline
- everest: the unknown is a powerful arbiter of the imagination. at the time, we did not know what was on everest - as we did not (and still do not) know what's in the deepest parts of the ocean, or what was on the dark side of the moon. we could always guess, but you don't know until you can measure it. so, why couldn't there by something bizarre at the top of everest - martians, yeti, or even just a new species of ungulates? as asimov points out in his notes, we have now scaled everest and now know what's there. but, never forget that the point of this genre is to scale the unknown mentally, before we can actually observe.
- the caves of steel (II): so, as i was offline for a bit, i decided to get the first asimov reading done. i had to take a few naps through it, but it only really took a few hours - which is less time than these short story collections. so, it should actually pick up, i think. two per week/minimum until i catch up...i could potentially do 3-4 of these in a 24 hour period if i'm alert and awake enough. so, i could do the entire foundation series in a weekend. and, that was what i intended to do with this, right? i could even still do the naked sun this weekend.
what do i think of the caves of steel?
on the surface, this is yet another sherlock holmes style detective story merely set in a universe with robots, and that features a robot in the role of our dear watson. i sleuthed that out with little effort; it was elementary. clearly. no shit; really. but, this isn't of a lot of interest to me, or to history. it's really the background universe that's of some interest, and the ideas he's setting off against each other in the whodunnit, rather than the whodunnit it, itself. i'm consequently not going to concern myself much with plot. so, what is this really about?
as asimov has passed into the realm of classics departments (something i've pointed out before), his texts have picked up a lot of religious hubris, a lot of it in an apparent misreading of his work that is intended to interpret him through the filter of his much less talented and very shady contemporary, l. ron hubbard. somehow, the openly atheist asimov has become recast as a secret religionist, or even a sympathizer of radical islam. as i am going to be reclaiming asimov for the atheist left as i do this, let's get the point clear, before we start - this is a direct quote from asimov, from 1982, when he was acting president of the american humanist society:
I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.
that's pretty unambiguous, i'd say.
now, that doesn't mean that asimov won't explore religious ideas, usually in an attempt to discredit them, and he clearly does very frequently do so. asimov was very much in the now lost tradition of intellectual liberalism (stemming from the likes of mill) that argued that it is better to expose one's opponents than ignore them. so, just because asimov talks about religion, or gives religion a voice in his texts, doesn't mean he's secretly aligned with it, given that all evidence suggests the opposite, and in a fairly aggressive way. it would seem odd that the classics departments seem so eager to misunderstand him, apparently on purpose.
so, there are some religious references here, but the book is not about religion, and none of the organizations are really intended to represent any sort of religious body, nor does asimov really defend or attack religion in any substantive manner. the religious references are mild cultural throwaways with little real depth or meaning at all.
so, if the text is not about religion, what is it about? the answer is that the text is about communism. i told you from the start that i was going to implement a marxist reading of asimov, which i think is the most accurate one in terms of his intent. so, here we go...
let's just get the setting down, first.
so, we're many eons into the future, and the earth is being recolonized by humans that had previously colonized places outside of the solar system, many centuries after the earth had abandoned further colonizing outer space. as the humans that left the earth did not have anarchy in reproduction, they are physically and mentally more robust and have far more advanced developments in technology (including far more advanced robots); however, they have also lost the vigour created by the randomness of natural selection, and are more prone to disease. for that reason, the earth is walled off from the colony by a force field and contact between the native humans and the returning colonists is strictly minimal. on the earth, humans have mostly retreated indoors (into caves of steel) by moving into giant hive-like cities that have no contact with natural phenomena like wind, rain or sun. the people in these cities live in a techno-communist dystopia with strong orwellian undertones, and this may be one of the earliest actual articulations of such a thing. a secret society of "medievalists" opposes this, is concerned about the job-killing effects of mechanization and wants to go "back to the soil". through the course of the text, it is explained that the colonists have returned to earth to convince the earth to return to active colonization, as it is perceived that overpopulation on the earth may lead to it becoming a threat to other planets. the story ends with the colonists deciding on a plan to co-opt the medievalist movement, and convert it into a pro-colonization movement, from the inside.
this was published in 1953, which was just after 1984 (a clear influence on the youngish asimov) and in the scariest parts of the cold war, coming out of world war two.
i think it's easy enough to naively misinterpret this as being about conservative religious groups fighting against technology, but it's less clear to me how anybody could think asimov was taking the side of the conservative, primitivist medievalists, if for no other reason than that the story is clearly written from the opposing perspective. you shouldn't need to know anything about asimov to realize it's a critique of primitvism, rather than an articulation of support for it. but, even that reading is, i think, missing the real point - what asimov is really setting up here is not a conflict between pro and anti technological forces, but rather a conflict between the unorganized utopian socialism of actual workers and the vanguard force of what marx called "scientific" socialism, in the bureaucracy of government. and, if we are to adopt the sherlock holmes approach in addressing this, the clues are pretty heavy-handed. no shit. really...
asimov tends to correct marx, a little, on the topic. marx is insistent that workers will take control of the means of production, and place robots under their command; asimov, with the hindsight of the luddite movement, and the general development of the democratic party (including the "progressive" movement) in the post-reconstruction years, seems to realize that the fourierism of utopian socialism is a better reflection of worker psychology. the most recent manifestation of this is the reaction to globalization, where remnants of the left found themselves in a struggle against workers, to try to prevent them from retreating inwards, but this fundamental mistake by marx is empirically demonstrable so long as we've had any sort of machines. we don't tend to want to take control of the machines, as we should; we want to destroy them, instead. asimov's insight into human behaviour is pretty valuable, here - whether it's innate or taught, we're a pretty conservative species, socially, and we tend to collapse into the most reactionary tendencies with little prodding. asimov clearly doesn't enjoy this, but he realizes the truth of it. so, asimov doesn't imagine that the future is run by a corrupt worker's committee that went fascist at the first hint of power, so much as he imagines that the workers of the distant future are still the same old utopian socialists from the 1840s, or the 1930s, and a communist vanguard has developed out of capital to run society, instead.
remember: the idea of capitalism competing with socialism is a bourgeois strawman that is incoherent in a marxist framework, as socialism arises from capitalism in an evolutionary process, and does not abolish it in a competitive process. to a marxist, capital ought to be on the side of socialism. but, the anti-technology conservatism of primitivism and ludditism is a serious, reactionary force to be reckoned with. so, the real opponents of communism become the proletariat, itself - unless they can be co-opted to realize their irrational and reactionary tendencies.
so, his vision of new york (one of the caves of steel) is a techno-communist dystopia that seems to essentially be a parody of the kibbutz system, but it's entirely top down, and retains all kinds of remnants of hierarchy, with irony, but not dripping with it. asimov subtlety critiques this, but he seems to feel it's inevitable, and doesn't really get excited about it. the kinds of restrictions on every day life that might be viciously criticized by the anarchist orwell or by a more liberal critique of socialism are written of passively, and even approvingly, by asimov; to asimov, it is merely efficiency at work, and there's little use in irrationally resisting it. and, to some extent, he's right, even if we don't know the real limits of production on this planet, as of yet.
there are indeed discussions of malthus that seem to underlie the vision that i'll leave out of this analysis. that is ultimately what he's getting at: overpopulation. while we keep putting this off, we're in the midst of an energy crisis that we've been dealing with since the 70s (and asimov very astutely talks about running out of uranium in a distant nuclear-powered future, after we've run out of coal, which is why it's not an answer to the problems we have today) and a lot of the problems he's talking about are actually startlingly current. i've recently started eating nutritional yeast as a meat replacement (albeit mostly for health reasons), and i've written repeatedly about the need to move to hydroponics, as the soil rapidly depletes in value.
so, does that mean i'm on the side of the vanguard and opposed to the medievalists? while asimov clearly comes down on the side of embracing robots via his character of baley, which is not surprising, he doesn't clearly take a side, here. but, let's recall what he's placing in opposition to one another: this is a conflict between "utopian" and "scientific" socialism, and really about infighting on the left. it's really not any sort of broad ideological discourse that requires taking a firm position on. in the end, he presents a dialectic to resolve the conflict, by constructing an algorithm to let the vanguard work through the utopian movements via co-option. and, if it was that easy, right?
but, my answer is not really. asimov was a liberal (i keep saying that.) of the old-timey variety, which meant he was a communist in slow motion, or a communist in theory but with reservations in practice. his brand of liberalism wanted communism in the end, but didn't see a way to get there. so, he's really writing about tactics, via a narrative about robots.
i'm an anarchist, and i'm coming down on this in a very different way - while i share marx' critique of fourierism, which would have been very similar to his never written critique of progressivism, i am exceedingly distrustful of vanguards. so, i'd have to argue that his technocracy, as dystopian as it is, really isn't all that realistic; if you allow for a dictatorship of resources, you're going to end up with decadence and corruption of the worst sort, you're not going to get this ordered meritocracy that he's projecting. further, i thoroughly reject marx' strawmen arguments against proudhon and bakunin, as utopians; i think it's marx that harboured the stronger sympathies for religion, and even because he understood it as a tool of oppression, and that it is marx that comes off as more utopian. so, i'm going to fall somewhere in between here, and i'm going to suggest that asimov's dialectical solution is more than a little naive, even as i point out that it might also be trite - it might be somewhat of a sarcastic joke. there has to be a better way to place the technology into common ownership that allows for distributive justice and real democracy, which is what the left should be and is supposed to be about.
but, that's what this is - it's an allegory of the conflict between utopian and scientific socialism, and one that leaves an anarchist a little on the sidelines.
i actually kind of want to do the second part of this right away, so i'm going to just get to it and could potentially be done by mid-afternoon.
- sucker bait (V): this is a too-long story about a planet with beryllium dust that is a danger to humans that lacks a level of believability, in the end - humans would be expected to be comprehensive in checking for elements on a planet's surface, one would have to assume. there's ultimately too much character development and too many descriptive sections that simply drag a story out for 70+ pages that lacks any meaningful actual point.
- the pause: pointless nonsense.
- the immortal bard (VII): an amusing, but pointless, attack on annoying, pretentious english majors.
- foundation of sf success: self-congratulatory nonsense.
- lets not: pointless nonsense
- its such a beautiful day (I): he's making a valid, excellent point about the alienation between humanity and nature brought on by the imposition of virtual reality. i would rather go outside sometimes, too. there's nothing wrong with the kid - there's something wrong with the society.
- the singing bell: asimov's mysteries
- question:
- risk (I): more empty plot. throwaway.
- the last trump: i didn't read this one, as i got turned off by the mention of an angel in the opening paragraph.
- franchise (I): well, does your vote count? do you have a responsibility to vote? will it come down to you? asimov frequently writes these sardonic explorations of frequently stated turns of phrase, whether thought through or not. but, i think his older character gets the right idea: you can't determine voting patterns strictly via demographics, there's a level of uncertainty - indeed a level of irrationality - inherent to democracy that cannot and should not be disturbed.
the talking stone - asimov's mysteries
the portable star
dreamworld
- dreaming is a private thing (VII): the government has no place in the virtual reality helmets of the nation. but, this is an interesting projection of what might be coming.
- the message: this is similar to the story that was published right after, the dead past, in that it examines the question of using time travel to write history papers. asimov started off in chemistry, but wrote widely on history. there is no actual story here, though - it's just the articulation of an idea.
- the dead past (VII): this is mostly a parody of the division of labour in academia, using a parable of exploring specific questions of carthaginian identity through the filter of a device that allows researchers to peer backwards into time by retrieving data embedded into tachyon neutrinos, which it turns out have a limited ability to reconstruct the past. the science is a bit far-fetched (you would have to find neutrinos present in the moment being searched for, which are probably mostly out in outer space), but the parody of a division of labour is interesting.
- hell-fire: this isn't a story, and i think the point he's making is fairly juvenile.
- living space (V): he seems to be playing with a naive articulation of the many world interpretation of quantum physics, one that allows humans to move back and forth between different possible universes by means of converting into a probability pattern. it's not really well-formed, but i get the point. unfortunately, no physicist would actually go with this - the many worlds are not even theoretically real but just mathematically necessary on paper, and nobody really talks about physical manifestations of these parallel realities. it's a kind of mathematical identity in the form of a broad summation that i'd generally argue is, itself, not that well defined. the lebensraum twist is comical but he's right - if we can one day hop between parallel realities, then all possible universes can, as well. so, is an infinite number of realities seeking space in an infinite number of worlds really an answer to the malthusian problem, then? technically, it actually shouldn't be, in the long run, but you need to do some transfinite arithmetic to actually work that out. and, asimov gets there eventually, using more of a naive argument about aliens.
what's in a name - asimov's mysteries
- the dying night (VII): one of asimov's recurrent mysteries that happens to feature the concept of "mass transference" (the transporters from star trek) set in a reality with space travel.
- someday (I): what i find interesting about this is the idea that we might one day have handheld computing devices that talk to us, leading to a decline in literacy rates amongst the younger generation, who are desperate to get around the parental locks on the devices. this was written in 1956. this robot is unusual in an asimovian sense, in that it seems to be able to understand human speech beyond it's programming, a common idea in science fiction, but one which is impossible, and which asimov would, usually, be the first to (refreshingly) write off as nonsense. you don't expect that kind of silliness from asimov. but, asimov uses that unusual ability to allow for the robot to recognize that it's not being respected, and you can again choose to interpret that as futuristic or contemporaneous, in whatever way you'd prefer. someday, indeed.
- each an explorer (V): interesting premise, but not much of a point. it's an idea that he also explored in green patches.
pate de foie grras - asimov's mysteries
- the watery place (VII): the canals were on mars, not on venus. again, asimov seems to be extrapolating sardonically on the question of what might happen if a ufo were to land in small-town usa, perhaps with shades of hg wells. is he making a valid point? he might be. it's almost like a coen brothers film, in a sense. but, you'd think the aliens would know better, even if the modelling of human behaviour is relatively apt.
- first law: this is written as a kind of a fishing tale, and is a later piece that's not meant to be taken seriously.
- gimmick's three: well, if you ever want to outsmart the devil, here's some clues, as to how. i think that the far side is a better comparison than dante.
- the last question: silly take on the big crunch theory of infinite inflation and deflation (although it seems to predate it). of course, the computer couldn't function anymore in such an energy-dissipated reality, as the energy required to run it would be too spread out to harness. the computer would die with the sun. and, finding a way to reverse the expansion would take all of the energy dissipated into nothingness. so, this is again utterly nonsensical. we don't know why the universe exists, but we can be certain it wasn't created by a supercomputer left at the end of the last inflation event as that would contradict the physical basis of it existing. it's disappointing to learn that asimov considers this his most substantive story, as it seems to be one of his least insightful.
- jokester (I): see, i think it's best to interpret this as a joke itself, although i like the idea of a supercomputer pleading with a bad comic to stop. i tell a lot of jokes myself, and they tend to be intended to numb the pain of existence, or otherwise neutralize the absurdity of it. it's ultimately, biologically, a stress-relieving response. so, i don't think we need to seek religious solutions, when an evolutionary one is so apparent; that seems rather backwards, especially coming from asimov. that said, i would also reject the idea that only humans use amusement as a stress response. i've met some dogs that have great senses of humour, and that seem to be able to laugh as well as they can cry.
- the naked sun (II): i decided to just get right to the second part of the robot series. the third part was written 25 years later, and i'll approach it separately, with a fourth part. i'll no doubt split the foundation series in two as well, despite my previous comments.
unfortunately, i can't write out a detailed analysis of this text, because it doesn't justify one (edit: or, at least, i didn't initially think that it justified one. i have since expanded this review to further discuss it's treatment of marx' theory of alienation, which appears to be the point of the text). we are once again thrust into a sherlock holmes mystery, with baley playing the role of sherlock and daneel playing the role of watson (and you'll have to ask somebody else to explore the judaic significance of a story with characters that have the names of elijah, daniel and jezebel - i'm not interested), but there is no underlying allegory. it's really just plot.
that said, it happens to be that the setting is coincidentally worth discussing a little bit strictly because it mirrors the social relations we find ourselves in during the covid pandemic. on the planet of solaria, which is where baley and daneel are sent to solve a crime in this episode, people live as isolated individuals in mansions dotted across the surface by hundreds or thousands of miles, with upwards of 50 robots designed to serve each individual in specific manners, in a perfect division of labour. if asimov is toying with the leftist critique of the division of labour yet again, or drawing comparisons to slave to slave owner ratios in early 19th century america, he doesn't run with it (there is what seems like a forced reference to the helots in sparta, that i suspect may have been forced as a distraction, given that the references to american slavery are heavy-handed and longstanding), nor does he play with the idea of alienation, as presented by marx, which is a theory that i'm critical of, in too deep a manner - even if it's arguably the actual purpose of the text, something that i've decided to discuss in further detail, in this space. asimov again seems to come down somewhere in the middle of this debate over the importance of physical human contact in the maintenance of normal human mental health, both exploring the positive aspects of a society rooted strictly in contact via virtual reality, and in which physical touching and sex are frowned upon as primitive and sort of disgusting behaviours, and noting some of the potential drawbacks in terms of quality of life and in terms of blowback in the form of antisocial behaviour. i suppose it's an objective exploration of the idea, in that sense. but, as mentioned, this is really strictly of interest because it's contemporary - it makes you wonder what the next pandemic might be like, 100 years from now.
why am i critical of marx' views on alienation? i should acknowledge that this is a subtle thing, but it comes down to a rejection of the marxist/hegelian concept of how humans define ourselves, in terms of purpose and self-worth. basically, i don't think we define our worth in terms of our labour, and i think that only a slave could ever argue that we do, or that we ought to. i'd argue that the alienation of the worker from their labour (and ultimately from society) is desirable, and that this is actually why we want communism - that placing labour in the hands of automation, or otherwise separating it from individual humans through a process of socializing it, is the best way to reclaim our humanity and purpose, as emancipated individuals that define ourselves in terms other than our labour-purpose. an emancipated, free person ought to define their purpose in terms of their artistic expression, or in terms of their leisure time, and not in terms of their labour, as defined as some kind of collectivist contribution to society; in many cases, a free person might choose to spend their time doing something that we might currently describe as labour, but they would do it as a form of recreation, and not in order to justify their self-worth. but, this is why i'm an anarchist and you're not - i reject the producerism, i reject the romanticization of labour and instead assert that labour is a necessary evil, something we have to do whether we like it or not, and something we should all thoroughly despise as unbefitting of a free human being. the value of robots - of automation, of mechanization - is supposed to be that it frees us of the necessity to perform this unwanted evil of labour. to an anarcho-communist, separating the worker from their labour is the whole point - it's not a process of being alienated from anything, but a process of being emancipated from the slavery of market relations.
let's get back to the text. if the purpose of the text is to explore "alienation" via this mechanism of a planet where people only interact via virtual reality, however weakly it is actually developed, then what is asimov really getting at with this? is it a marxist critique of capitalist social relations? am i as opposed to what asimov thought as i am to what marx thought? see, that all seems a little off, given that (1) solaria is a broadly communist society, where there is no longer any conflict over control of the means of production and competition does not exist and (2) what asimov seems to be criticizing, the separation of the human from their "tribe" (by which he means society), is not really what "alienation" means in a marxist framework (it refers to a worker being alienated from the product of it's labour, not individuals being alienated from society, or technology acting as a force of alienation, although the latter has been frequently applied as a tool in a discourse on marxist alienation). the actual reality is that what asimov is getting at is sort of blurry and not particularly well formed, but nonetheless is some kind of vague critique of the idea of a society where individuals have no connection to each other and is probably influenced by marx' writing on alienation, perhaps via a secondary source. he's not the first person to apply the idea of marxist alienation in a blurry or non-specific manner and he probably won't be the last, but it makes a review like this difficult. do i analyze what marx actually said about alienation, or do i analyze asimov's confused or naive take on it? or do i just point out that asimov is talking about "alienation" without really talking about "marxist alienation" and kind of leave it at that?
asimov actually seems to point to some upsides of the social relations he's describing (and, in the end, the main character decides he has to leave the earth because he can no longer live in the new york city kibbutz because it's stifling his individuality), but each of his characters seem to be introduced to develop specific reasons why such a social relation isn't particularly desirable. this is why it seems to be the point of the text: what we have is a detective arriving on this strange world and being sequentially introduced to different characters that all demonstrate a different reason why the defining social relation on the planet is not a good one (and i'll leave the formal essay to whatever high school student gets here first). the character of leebig, who commits suicide on the threat of human contact, even seems to be a parody of the archetypal introverted science nerd, taken to the extreme. that said, while asimov may be fairly clear in his critique of the alienation defining the social relations in the society he's describing, even if it's not a strictly marxist critique, and even if the society isn't very capitalist, he isn't always convincing in his critique, and i find that a lot of his intended arguments against what he seems to be deciding is "alienation" are actually fairly compelling arguments in favour of the value of escaping from the deadening aspects of a collectivist society that dulls the abilities of individual expression. while i do not think it's intentional on asimov's behalf, i actually frequently find myself relating more to the solarians than i do to baley.
so, there isn't a clear allegory in the text, and the application of marx' theory of alienation isn't always well informed, but it is nonetheless clear that asimov was trying to write a novel that critiques the idea of alienation, and was influenced by marx in what he was doing. maybe i'm missing the point - maybe there's some irony in what he's doing, in twisting the situation around, and introducing alienation into an advanced techno-communist dystopia. maybe he's redefining the concept of alienation as it may exist in an actual dystopian future, and maybe he's even suggesting that alienation (as he's defining it) is actually an inescapable consequence of marx' theories, meaning maybe he's more on my side than i think. but, i think the balance of evidence is that he's working with an idea that's come to him second hand, or that he didn't fully understand, and that, as a result, it's hard to sort it out all these years later.
one may note that the character of gloria (who exists to show a specific perceived downside of the end of physical human social contact) is exactly the sort of character that asimov was frequently criticized for not writing into his novels. it's just more evidence that his feminist admirers are more grounded in reality than his feminist detractors.
there is also a weak tie-in to the previous text's plot about utopian socialist medievalists, in that asimov does explicitly present solaria as an exaggeration of the wastefulness of contemporary earth. so, that's the ironic plot twist - the earthling of the future experiencing self-realization at seeing his own history in the mirror. but, this is really only done in passing and comes off as comical more than it does as profound. there are also further explorations of the culture of the outer worlds - the vanguard - which are further explorations of the kibbutz theme, also drawing heavily from plato. there are further references to malthus and a further exploration of the potential positive uses of eugenics. so, asimov does explore the basic premise of the first novel a little bit more, but he doesn't really expand upon anything substantive, by doing so. the text ends with asimov revisiting the ending of the first volume, in deciding that humans must return to colonizing space to prevent the earth from surpassing it's carrying capacity.
this somewhat difficult sidestepping of the discussion of marxist alienation aside, the text is really otherwise fairly unexciting, unless you're actually into the whodunnit thing, in which case it should be noted that it's one of asimov's longer texts in that style, for better or worse.
i had to nap this afternoon, but i want to get through the last short stories collection (the bicentennial man) this weekend as well, and then get to the actual journal entries (five and counting...) over the next week. remember: i'm over two years behind on this. i really need to pick it up, and if the broken computer gives me an excuse for a few weeks, so be it.
- strike breaker (V): this is another of asimov's many texts exploring social ostracism using the mechanism of space exploration and a reminder that systemic discrimination need not necessarily be left behind here, as we leave this planet behind.
dust of death - asimov's mysteries
- let's get together (VII): the idea that the soviets might be able to send "total conversion" bombs (a type of suicide bomber capable of detonating a nuclear device) to the united states in the guise of androids indistinguishable from humans, because they are far more advanced than us, is peculiarly absurd - but that's just the point. this is a story about the paranoia that set in during the cold war, and is actually exceedingly insightful in it's projection of that conflict collapsing into mass paranoia, reduced to symbolic movements in a game theoretic stalemate, down to the climax of absurdity that set in with reagan, when the soviets found themselves unable to react to the irrational actions of a clear madman, driven by the complete absence of any sort of predictability or logic. conservatives are right when they point out that the sharp increase in military spending under reagan ended the cold war, but not for the reasons they suggest. the truth is that the soviets were convinced that reagan was on the brink of ending it all in a fit of paranoia and dementia and stepped back because they found his unpredictability to be a threat to the existence of humanity, itself. if asimov was able to see this so clearly in 1957...
- the author's ordeal: more self-congratulatory nonsense.
- blank: if they truly found themselves stuck in time, they would not be able to move, either. utter nonsense.
- does a bee care: well, a bee or a wasp couldn't care because it doesn't truly have a brain, it's simply a dumb terminal that is controlled by chemical stimuli. does this entity have a brain? you'd have to dissect it, i guess. he's making a valid observation in some sense, but if i'm getting the underlying implication that humans are in some ways like bees, i think he's failing to grasp the difference in biological complexity between a mammal (which has a brain that independently processes the world around it) and an insect (which does not), which is the mistake that collectivism/fascism is rooted within, this idea that we're all components of a larger body that needs to work together, like a machine. that's just not right - humans, by means of their independent processing facilities, are just simply biologically not much like bees and consequently can never be much like bees, whether a managerial class wishes it were true, or not. robots, on the other hand....
- a woman's heart
- profession (V): this is a curious story about the futility of being intelligent within the emptiness of technocratic capitalism. it's fundamentally a critique of the corporatization of the education system, and rooted in asimov recognizing an often unstated truth: the university is as much of a refuge for those that can't survive in the market as it as a hierarchical structure for the intellectual elite.
a loint of paw - asimov's mysteries
ideas die hard - winds of change
- i'm in marsport without hilda: pointless smut.
- insert knob a in hole b: it's rather unlikely that anybody will ever be eating steak in space. this is otherwise a rather cliched nerd joke about "some assembly required".
- galley slave (I): this is a short whodunnit in a sherlock holmes style, which is how calvin is frequently deployed. asimov just barely touches on the opposition to robots, in setting up a disgruntled sociology prof that's willing to suicide bomb his own career in order to take the robots out of service. again, i'd like this to be more profound than it actually is.
- the gentle vultures (VII): asimov is doing one of the things he's known for, which is to take a historical entity (the hurrians, which i believe were the sister-race to the sumerians, and which lived in the caucasus region, north of the fertile crescent. they frequently came into conflict with the various semitic groups that replaced the sumerians, who frequently warred amongst each other) and project it forwards into time, making it a character in a space alien story. this becomes a science fiction trope, in time. romans become romulans, mongols become klingons, etc. this is not to mention asimov's roman-influenced galactic empire, itself. besides retelling the story of hurrian supremacy over the semitic tribes via the space alien mechanism, the story itself isn't much.
- spell my name with an s: asimov has written a number of stories about the paranoia that defined the cold war. he may be expressing some discrimination he experienced, as a russian-american. this is otherwise pointless.
- lenny (I): so, lenny is an autistic robot, due to something malfunctioning in manufacturing. asimov tersely explores some social relations around that. the corporation wants to do away with it, but calvin wants to study it because she wants to teach it how to learn, something robots couldn't do in asimov's universe to that point. so, lenny is a robot free of instinct that needs to be taught what it knows, like mammals. asimov is kind of grappling with a concept of artificial intelligence, and this actually becomes the main plotline moving forwards, although it was actually written last (and may have even been written to introduce that ai narrative, as there is really nothing else to this).
- i just make them up, see: more self-congratulatory nonsense.
- the feeling of power (I): multiplication by hand as a mysterious, magical power; it's like something from a monty python skit. this idea of technology making us stupid, of it thrusting us into a new dark age, is a frequent theme in asimov, though, and one that many others have picked up on, recently. so, comical plotline aside, there's maybe something profound, here. can your average adult multiply large numbers by hand, nowadays? something else to note is that we have to guess how the greeks (not to mention the babylonians) did mathematics with a primitive or awkward (base-60 in the case of the babylonians) numeral system (and without 0), and our discourses on the topic would no doubt seem as silly to an ancient athenian or babylonian as this story does to us.
- silly asses: if the idea is an attempt at morality, suggesting it would be better to conduct nuclear research on somebody else's planet is a strange idea of morality.
- all the troubles of the world (I): asimov seems to want to misunderstand the concept of probability on purpose, here. no machine could ever decide where or if a crime is going to occur, there would necessarily be uncertainty and it would necessarily be wrong relatively frequently. acting on all false alarms would both create civil rights issues and be uneconomical. i mean, it's a swell enough idea to imagine a computer that can predict crime, but it's utterly nonsensical and utterly unrealistic. nor do we know why multivac wants to die, in the end.
- buy jupiter: pointless nonsense
- the uptodate sorcerer: boring smut
- the ugly little boy (VII): this is a fairly forward thinking analysis of neanderthal humanity, given that it was written in the 1950s, when neanderthals were thought to have been barbaric cavemen. there was a competing hypothesis that neanderthals may have specifically been the unique ancestors of white europeans, which we today know is wrong; today, we know (from dna) that humans interbred with neanderthals and that they were probably a sister species, homo sapiens neanderthalensis. the introduction of a concept of pathos here would have been rather remarkable for it's time. it is, however, fundamentally a human interest story, rather than a sci-fi story. i suppose that it would probably be the inspiration underlying the film encino man.
- a statue for father: pointless nonsense
anniversary - asimov's mysteries
- unto the fourth generation: pointless
obituary - asimov's mysteries
- rain, rain go away: pointless nonsense
- rejection slips: more self-congratulatory nonsense.
- thiotimoline and the space age
- what is this thing called love: pointless
- the machine that won the war: while this is meant to be ironic, the underlying point is to draw attention to the importance of randomness in computing, which is maybe not as well understood as it ought to be. these (perhaps outdated) popular perceptions of computers as infallible and omnipotent devices is rooted more in fiction than in fact.
- my son, the physicist: another outlandish nerd joke
star light - asimov's mysteries
- author! author!: some self-reflection on the writing industry. so, it's a short story about writing short stories. kramerian, but not that interesting. wasn't published until the 60s, i think for good reason.
- eyes do more than see (VII): eyes and ears are of course mechanical objects that can be represented in software, so we don't have to lose their functionality in the process of digitization. but, he makes a good point that we shouldn't forget their importance, in terms of actually enjoying existence. faced with the realization of my mortality, i see no delusion in pretending that a senseless existence is not preferable to the lack of one altogether, but i cannot pretend to understand how i might analyze such a thing billions of years into it.
- founding father (V): earth's early atmosphere is thought to have been full of ammonia, and that's no doubt where he's going with this story about humans crashing on the planet of an oxygenless atmosphere and being unable to remove the ammonia, yet succeeding in the process at the point of death.
the man who made the 21st century
the key - asimov's mysteries
- prime of life: pointless poem
the billiard ball - asimov's mysteries
- segregationist (VII): likewise, this is ultimately about self-acceptance, and has a very different undertone in that respect than most of asimov's work, and it's not clear that he's being critical of that different undertone, although the context of replacing a defective heart is also rather different than the context of accepting some idiosyncratic part of your individuality, so that is sort of a false comparison. you could interpret it as being a discourse surrounding the not-yet-existing transhumanist movement; he's certainly reaching for it, at least, in imagining a future where a senator has to choose between a bio-identical "plastic" heart and a mechanically functioning, metallic robot heart that would put him on the path towards transitioning from human to robot. but, as before, it may be more accurate to look at it from a then contemporary perspective (which, in this case, means 1967), and frame the discourse around racial mixing, instead. asimov presents both sides of the debate, so you can weigh the arguments he makes and decide for yourself. personally, i'll opt for betterment over stasis - although i'd suggest that, based on the arguments in the text, the plastic heart is the better option. in this hypothetical future of organ modularity, the ideal is frequent tune-ups, rather than permanent replacement.
- exile to hell: this is again merely an ironic twist hidden in a very short narrative. but, these places of exile tend to do fairly well, and i wouldn't mind being exiled from capitalism, myself - i'd consider that a way out, as many of the british (and scottish) in truth felt about australia.
- key item (I): it seems that, later on, and to my surprise. asimov wrote several silly stories about multivac taking on human characteristics, which mirrors his narrative about the humanization of robots. this story has no purpose at all, besides to demonstrate the strange human behaviour of being polite to a machine. and, i guess i should ask, because i'd never talk to a computer, myself - do you ask alexa poltely, and thank her when she gives you the answer?
- the proper study: this is an interesting introduction, but there is no story here.
- the holmes-ginsbrook device
- feminine intuition (I): this is a later piece that seems to be a sarcastic reply to some critiques of susan calvin as a character. i actually agree with asimov, via calvin - the entire critique is daft, and this is a fitting way to kill her off. however, when you read the text in the order presented in the complete robot, you also get a sequence of humanization in the robots, in the direction of time. that fact makes this story worth keeping in sequence, even if it's point is to let calvin smack some third-wavers on the knuckles with her cane.
- waterclap: an aimless, nerdy discourse between an astronaut and a deep-sea explorer opens up into an evil plot by the astronaut to destroy the deep-sea vessel, and some quick thinking to talk the astronaut out of it. it's clever, but pointless.
- a problem of numbers
- the best new thing
- 2430 ad / the greatest asset (VII): these are two different takes on the idea of humans completely eliminating all biodiversity on the planet, to the point where we're the only non-domesticated lifeform. in some sense, this would have to be unavoidable, unless we reach some kind of natural cyclic carrying capacity (it would need to be the result of increased viral activity, which makes sense in the context of exploding population growth), but it nonetheless strikes me as incomprehensible. something would go wrong, or we wouldn't let it happen. but, it is nonetheless an interesting exercise in contemplating the inevitable consequences of the unsustainability of infinite growth, which we're going to have to get a grasp of, eventually.
- mirror image (II): this is a gap text in the robot series that plugs in between the naked sun and the robots of dawn and was, for a time, the last installment in that series. this is the first application of the robot laws in this text (despite the fact that the story was written in the 70s, after all of the classic robot stories), and they are applied like an axiomatic system to solve a logical problem, although it actually comes off more as a parody of sherlock holmes than anything else - which is all very typical of baley & daneel stories. there's not much depth to the story beyond that. i should, however, point out that there are actually a couple of examples of mathematicians making competing claims for the discovery of an idea, the most famous being the argument between leibniz and newton for the rightful discoverer of the calculus. another, however, is the argument between gauss and bolyai for the discovery of non-euclidean (or post-euclidean) geometry, and that might be the more direct inspiration on the story. there are countless lesser examples. we gloss over this in math class by arguing that the logic is out there in the ether and that if the ideas are in the zeitgeist then the proofs will follow naturally, something we can all demonstrate to each other by simply doing homework. but, in the case of non-euclidean geometry, it does in fact seem that gauss rather maliciously stole the idea from the young bolyai and nobody really called him on it for decades after the fact. i'm only speculating about the influence, but that's a story you can look up, if you'd like.
- take a match: pointless nonsense
- thiotimoline to the stars: pointless nonsense
- light verse (I): this is a short piece from the 70s, and is just about the idea that a computational defect may be a benefit. you shouldn't be so quick to decide that something - or somebody, as it may be - needs a fixing. maybe they're just fine as they are.
the dream - ?
benjamin's dream - ?
party by satellite - ?
- ....that thou art mindful of him (I): this solves the problem that us robotics has long had about how to market robots to people. the solution is to create robots not in the imitation of women [as in the previous story] but in the imitation of animals, and to solve practical problems, like pest control. i have to admit that this sounds like a good idea, although i'm not sure that it leads to the replacement of carbon with silicon, in the end. asimov builds up the humanization of robots here a little further by replacing the robotics laws with humanics laws, setting up the last story:
- stranger in paradise: this is a later text that will come off as reminiscent of the mars pathfinder landing, for those that remember that happening, although the actual inspiration may be the failed soviet landings in the 1970s. i'm not sure why asimov insists that a rover would require that kind of complexity, although i suppose that moore's law would have provided for computational abilities in the 90s that would have been unimaginable in the 1970s. the subplot about an autistic child shape-shifting to a mars rover is likewise not very well extrapolated upon, but is another example of asimov grappling with mind-body.
benjamin's bicentennial blast - ?
half-baked publisher's delight - ?
heavenly host - ?
big game- ?
- the life and times of multivac: what asimov is actually doing in this piece is trolling the new york times, who asked him for something profound. it's pretentious, but it's not profound. freedom is a difficult concept, but it's hard to take the premise that asimov thought we'd be freer without robots seriously, given his body of work. is there some irony to this, then? some existentialist slant? i think it's mostly just empty troll...
- a boy's best friend: this is a short, undeveloped piece that really exists strictly to reverse the idea of obsolescence; here, the robot becomes obsolete when the real dog appears, and the kid wants to stick with the robot, instead. it's an empty sort of irony that comes off as sort of trite, in the lack of development. but, there is really a deeper point, here, in relation to asimov's discourse around the use of robots to replace human labour; while i'm going to ultimately agree with asimov about the usefulness of automation, i have to advance the argument that he never fully understood the opposition to robots, and that's what i'm getting here - it's an attempt at irony that exposes the author's longstanding lack of understanding of his opponents. but, i spent some time writing this because it could have been a powerful table-turner, through the three pages it takes up.
- point of view: i was surprised to see this story was written in 1975, as hamming codes (error-correction) had already been in existence for some time. i also wonder if 1975 is a little late to be talking about vacuum tube super computers, given that gates was programming basic into ibms, at the time. so, this is a story where asimov is maybe demonstrating his age, and being a little out of touch. that said, he's also reaching towards the primary problem in quantum computing, which is the lack of error codes. and, he's sort of dancing around floating point error as well, even if the premise of programming vacuum tube driven super computers with punch cards is anachronistic. so, how likely is it that a computer needs to go out and play at recess to get best results? it's a facile, silly suggestion, that probably reflects asimov coming to terms with the age of his audience more than anything else, even if anybody that's worked technical support knows that a reboot is often the best troubleshooting step, and that machines do, in fact, sometimes overheat. is there something else to this, then? i actually don't think he's even intending to be taken seriously, let alone that there's any deeper meaning to this; he's not reaching for something profound and missing it, so much as he's not reaching at all. he's just being silly. ha ha ha.
about nothing- winds of change
- the bicentennial man (I): this finally addresses the old problem of machines becoming human, and projects us robots many centuries into the future, using the mechanism of a robot that outlives several generations of the family it was sold into, and then wants to die with it, to prove it's really human. marvin minsky also seems to make a cameo, here, in the form of a robopsychologist that is proven wrong in the future. asimov goes over a lot of old themes here [mind-body problem, the liberation of robots as an allegory for the liberation of blacks, etc ] in what is an apparent thread-tying process, but he ultimately doesn't succeed in explaining what is driving this robot to act so irrationally. as humans, we may be expected to think this makes some kind of sense, due to some kind of emotional bias, but i can't really make sense of it, myself. i can understand why a robot might want to be free. i can't understand why it would want to be human, at all costs - including it's death. i think asimov was going for the jugular here and kind of fell over and kneed himself in the groin, instead - if this is his final projection of what becomes of robots in the future, it's unsatisfying, to say the least.
- the winnowing (VII): asimov talks a lot about population control, and i'm sure it's created some whispers, even if the smart kids could always work it out without needing much help. so, i think he sort of had to write this short, ironic tale of a scientist chosen to create a population control virus using it on the population controllers, instead. and, again, this is a curious read in the context of the covid-19 pandemic.
- old fashioned (VII): a space ship gets stuck in a black hole and sends an sos using morse code by tossing objects into the black hole. it's an interesting few pages, but it's not much of a story.
- marching in (VII): this is a sarcastic joke, but i like it, and it's true - music is the best therapy there is,
- birth of a notion: pointless nonsense
- the tercentenary incident: asimov is reflecting on the bicentennial by projecting forwards events into the tercentennial, in a manner not unlike orwell's 1984 (which is a description of events in 1948, as orwell saw them, and not intended to be a projection into the future, or a user manual as some have mockingly quipped). so, was gerald ford a robot? i'm not sure that's such an easy thing to dispel of, a priori.
no, really, that's the joke - that gerald ford is a robot. no shitting. certainly, asimov may be reflecting a little on the nature of then contemporary american politics, post-watergate, in his perception of the stage-managed state of affairs. but, the joke is that gerald ford is a robot, and that's really all that this is actually about.
good taste - winds of change
to tell at a glance - winds of change
- true love: this is both a prediction of internet dating (with unrealized accuracy) and an awkward attempt at an ironic plot twist that relies on the absurdity of a computer demonstrating uncontrolled sentience. the idea that a computer might understand "love", which doesn't even exist as a human idea before it's invention by capital to sell bullshit to idiots, is particularly ridiculous.
- think!: you really don't expect asimov to make the mistake of assigning sentience to a computer. the underlying premise that thought is energy, and thus transferable, is another example of asimov contemplating mind-body, which he does a lot, and which he doesn't seem to really resolve. i mean, he clearly realizes the falsity of the problem, but he's just as clearly not happy about it - and i don't think we're really past that. your mind is clearly a part of your body, but that doesn't mean we can't pry it out of it, in theory, however difficult it might be. but, inserting the computer via resonance is woo, and not very helpful or insightful; unfortunately, he's presenting it as the purpose of the discussion.
sure thing - winds of change
found - winds of change
fair exchange - winds of change
nothing for nothing - winds of change
how it happened - winds of change
it is coming - winds of change
the last answer - winds of change
for the birds - winds of change
getting even
death of a foy - winds of change
the last shuttle - winds of change
a perfect fit - winds of change
ignition point - winds of change
lest we remember -winds of change
winds of change - winds of change
one night of song - winds of change
azazel
the dim rumble
the super runner
the smile that loses
- the robots of dawn (III): ok, i got through the third volume (the robots of dawn), and i don't have much to add, nor do i think that the text was very worthwhile. i might even label broad swaths of it to be worthless pornography with no redeemable qualities that probably shouldn't have been published. so, do i even want to review this at all? i'm being comprehensive...
but, i'm not really excited about it, or have much of an urge to type about it. and, i don't want this to turn into a chore.
i think the key point is really realizing the 25 year difference. whereas the asimov that i knew and i respected was writing for a contemporary audience in the 40s and 50s, there were dramatic social changes that occurred in the 60s and 70s, and asimov would seem to be required to adjust to them for this book published in the 80s, if not voluntarily than no doubt by his publisher. so, that 25 year time lag is a sort of a clean break, conceptually. they're the same characters to start, but this novel is really twice as long as it needs to be because it needs to house certain types of additional characters, which people are expected to be more able to relate to, as per the norms of mass marketed fiction that developed at that time. so, the aloof and likeable solarian (gladia) is transformed into a somewhat disgusting, contemptible slut that has nothing worthwhile to say, including about her orgasm (why put that in your robot novel? who wants to read that kind of smut? who cares?). further, they had to include some kind of 70s hipster kid with ironic facial hair that's unable to get laid, to try to appeal to a certain segment of reader. none of this adds anything to the specific story or to the broader arch of the narrative and probably should have been cut - if the truth no doubt wasn't that it was included on the urging of the publisher, in the first place. so, asimov becomes a sad reflection of the empty society that he's writing from, at the dawn of reaganism. hey, could you prove reagan wasn't a robot? he survived a bullet, didn't he?
so, i'm not reacting well to the more contemporary style, i'm finding myself missing the classic asimov that's above gratuitous sex and not interested in empty plot development. in the 40s and 50s, science fiction was just a mechanism for dystopian literature, so it was not fundamentally different than other types of literature, really, it just had a different setting. and, that would have been true through the 60s (you can really see that in the initial run of star trek, which frequently played on everything in the traditional canon of literature, from shakespeare to classical mythology), up until star wars, which sort of broke everything and left the genre in a juvenile state of focusing on special effects, like any other adventure film. this third robot novel was written and published in the early 80s, in the midst of the major shift in the genre that was happening. the reality is that it appears that asimov was actually coerced (perhaps by large dollar figures) to return to writing fiction within the context of the blockbuster scifi films of the late 70s and early 80s, given that he was responsible for so many of the ideas underlying them. for that reason, the text seems to lack the more allegorical writing of his earlier years - it's just a run-on story about the adventures of an earthling and two robots, designed for the all-of-a-sudden very large market for vacuous adventurist science fiction.
this text also goes over a lot of previous ideas for the apparent reason of acting as a subtle means of advertising for his previous stories. the calvin references work their way into the story, but they don't add anything to it.
that said, asimov isn't entirely embracing this new reality, either. the critique of the sex life of aurorans seems to be a reflection of asimov's views on sexuality within the bourgeois elite in new york city, specifically, in the 70s. asimov seems to be suggesting that bourgeois american culture has overdone it on the sex, and reduced it to something meaningless and boring - so much so that the promise of unhindered sex with robots offers an escape from the ubiquitous mundanity of sex with people. i have to admit some sympathy with this perspective. this marxist critique of bourgeois sexuality (in an auroran society that is otherwise broadly communist - the same confusing juxtaposition that is in the second novel) is the closest thing to a purpose in the text, although he drops the narrative about a third of the way in, and instead detours off into pointless character development, to expand the length of the text for no real apparent reason, other than to try to create these characters that are supposed to generate feelings of identity in the reader. i might actually suggest that asimov may have been trying to write a third robot novel in the same framework as the first two (they all represent a potential failure point leading to a communist dystopia: the overcrowded kibbutz of earth, the marxist alienation of solaria and the empty bourgeois hedonism of vanguardist aurora), but got cut-off halfway by a publisher trying to create something that would appeal to star wars fans, who co-opted the novel into just aimlessly going on for hundreds of pages of empty action/adventure nonsense. sadly...
so, if the point of the story is that it's supposed to be about the emptiness of capitalist excess and unchecked bourgeois hedonism, it is even less cohesive and less developed than the second volume. but, the idea is there - if just barely. i can identify no further discernible purpose in the 430 page paperback, besides to waste the reader's time. the middle section really wasn't necessary - he could have gone from gladia to amadiro and maybe should have.
i think it's important to point out that asimov is repeatedly pretty rough on baley, and sort of passive aggressive with daneel, indicating that he might not be so excited about these characters any longer. i'd strongly suspect he was toying with killing them off. in fact, daneel has a very minor part in this story; the more important robot is giskard. baley is repeatedly treated as a fool that is unable to fend for himself, as a consequence of living in the kibbutz; there are frequent allusions to his child-like state, to the robots as his caretakers and even to gladia, at one point, as his mother. baley is not killed in the end, but he doesn't appear in the fourth installment, which i'm now dreading reading.
in terms of his broader narrative, asimov introduces a conflict between the pro-auroran globalists and the pan-humanity humanists that the humanists win, in this installment. you'd have to imagine that asimov (acting director of the humanist society) would be most sympathetic to humanists. it's a bit of a hint as to who represents his own views, in truth - something that might be different in 1980 than it was in 1955. asimov's subtle slights on baley may be another indication that he's changing hosts in the story, so to speak, and that he now looks down on baley, whereas he previously saw him as his own voice. asimov's globalists - a vanguard elite that puts itself first and looks down on the broader swath of humanity - is not all that different than the contemporary concept of "globalist", which comes from a strange merging of far-left and far-tight anti-elitism. asimov seems to want to present humanism as a truer from of egalitarianism, a less corrupt concept of liberalism and a more authentic left. fastolfe's "decency" is presented in this context of representing humanism. asimov and i may quibble over details as to what the anti-vanguard left ought to look like (he was a liberal, and i'm an anarchist), but we seem to agree on the need to present a counter-left as a movement against vanguardism. but, once again, this is about leftist infighting - it's not some broad ideological discourse. only the primitivist utopians on earth seem to offer any opposition to the spread of communism throughout the galaxy.
so, i'd have to broadly describe this as "disappointing", but i really do get where it's coming from, and in some ways it might have been impossible to avoid. i suppose that if you want to read the whole thing then you can't skip it, but i'll tell you: you're not missing much if you did.
potential
state capitol
the briefcase in the taxi
the bird that sang bass
the last caesar
saving humanity
a matter of principal
the evil drink does
writing time
triply unique
the ten second election
dashing through the snow
the year of the feast
the queen and king
hallucination - gold
logic is logic
- robots and empire (III):
he travels the fastest
feghoot & the courts - gold
the eye of the beholder
more things in hevaen and earth
the mind's construction
- robot dreams: elvex had a dream that, one day, robots would be judged by the content of their characters, and not by the paths in their positronic brains - and got shot by calvin for it. this is inadvisable, to say the least. that said, asimov doesn't exactly
condone the assassination of our equality-dreaming robot, nor is this the first pretty heavy-handed use of the robot-as-slave-in-america analogy. i mean, he repeatedly has his characters refer to his robots as "boy" - it's never stated explicitly, and i've tried to dance around it a little, but it's really front and centre. so, he clarifies a few points here about how he sees his characters - it is, indeed, calvin, the austere capitalist christian, that pulls the trigger, and at least
she thinks she's saving humanity. do you agree with her? but, i'm dropping this story as a mistake, and i find it a little bit uncomfortable that they gave him an award for
this, of all pieces. it also breaks sequence with the humanization theme. notably, asimov dropped this entirely for the later
robot visions - meaning he seems to have come to his senses about it.
left to right - gold
the fights of spring
galatea
the fable of the three princes - magic
the two centimetre demon
the turning point
flight of fancy
the smile of the chipper - gold
- christmas without rodney: grumpy old man bitching about bratty kids. i can relate, but meh.
the instability - gold
goodbye to earth - gold
alexander the god
northwesttward
the mad scientist
to your health
- too bad (VII): accepting the truth that chemo/radiation is a bad approach, mini robots to eat cancer isn't that far off from targeted gene therapy as a better solution. it's the same idea. although, it's worth pointing out that asimov had a phd in biochemistry, here, and still decided to use robots instead of chemistry; is that actually valuable foresight as to what approach is likely to actually work or is he missing the obvious? i'm curious how a microrobot would evade the macrophages, though, which opens up the opposite concern - microrobots as viruses.
- robot visions: so, maybe we'll have humaniform robots in the future and maybe we won't. and maybe we'll have peace, then. but, i wouldn't bet too much on it. this neither fits into the sequence - it's the opposite of it - nor is it that interesting, really.
fault-intolerant - gold
in the canyon - gold
kid brother - gold
gold - gold
cal - gold
prince delightful and the flameless dragon - magic
frustration - gold
