- blind alley: 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.

- death sentence: 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.

well, of course a systematic review of asimov is going to collapse into a psycho-analysis.

it's inevitable.

i'm awake today and making some progress. obviously, i'm going to have to alter my algorithm a little, because this is taking far too long.

but, if you want to talk psychology...

i'm sorting through this, and i have to point out that asimov seems to be approaching writing these stories as therapy. the text i'm reading through has commentary by asimov, and it's clear enough that he just wrote about what was happening in his life, but the fact that he so frequently does so in a tongue-in-cheek or satirical manner suggests that he's really processing the things around him by turning them into jokes, something every nerd understands fairly well. existence is both painful and absurd, but you can numb the pain by deconstructing the absurd into the comedic. 

was he aware of that? is that a partial, err, foundation, of his persistent mockery of psychology? 

- 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.

- time pussy: umm.

- not final!: empty plot. throwaway.

- legal rites: again, i'm skipping the fantasy and mystery texts.

- super-neutron: 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.

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.

- the hazing: 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. 

- christmas on ganymede: silly christian-baiting from an atheist jew.

- 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.

- 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: 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.

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.

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.

no, honestly - it's a joke.

it starts on p. 96:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x9K7mJTcendZK4Rbu-wBL_W2PEU30MYP/view?usp=sharing

- the imaginary: 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.