so, there is something different about the dr. calvin sections (parts VI and VII, which carries on after her death) in that they're sort of quasi-linear in time. asimov's texts may have overlapping characters (although he never sticks with any specific character for very long), but they're largely one-off episodes, even when the characters are recurrent. even his foundation series is largely unordered in time. so, this calvin sequence, which comes off more like a series of episodes of a television show (before there were tv shows.) is unique in that sense and sort of has to be looked at as a singular text, for that reason. further, that comes out most prominently here in the complete robot compilation - the classic i, robot, which is what i actually read as a child, does not weave these stories together like this.

these stories otherwise pick up on most of the same themes as the previous ones.

i want, however, to point out that i don't think that dr. calvin is supposed to be a likeable character, and i suspect that asimov may have done that intentionally. i wasn't there, but i get the impression that calvin is being intentionally presented as a dour, mother-like figure precisely in order to not make her a sexual object, and asimov's presentation of her is essentially designed to throw off nerdy fan boys, looking for something to jerk off to. in later years, asimov would be presented as a feminist out to shatter gender roles with a strong female role model, but i don't think that was really his intent. i never met him, but from what i can gather about him, i think it's likely that he just found the idea of writing a sexual fantasy to be distasteful and, perhaps even under pressure to do so, did the exact opposite.

in addition to those that would elevate asimov as a feminist writer, there have long been claims of the opposite, that his writings lack female characters. i've never thought this was upheld by the evidence, and have generally deduced that people making such claims have probably not actually read much of his work, and are just using him as a punching bag to take out their dislike of science on - something that asimov does frequently write about. there's some irony that the kind of irrational lynch mob that asimov repeatedly satirizes seems to have actually come after him in real life.

so, what to make of this? was asimov a feminist or a misogynist?

my honest reaction is that it doesn't fucking matter and i don't actually remotely care. asimov was an unusually diverse writer for any period, but he wrote about what he understood. he was not shy in admitting that he didn't understand women very well, so he therefore didn't write about them very much. that's neither good nor bad, it just is. if you'd like to read novels that have female characters that you're better able to relate to (and calvin, as mentioned, seems to have been intentionally written in a way that minimizes the aspects of her character that boys might like, and therefore that many young women might relate to. hey, listen. that is what the critics said, and still say.), you should pick an author that understands women better than asimov did. but, if you're more interested in reading a social commentary that uses robots as characters than you are about reading a book with relatable female characters, asimov still holds up, for what it is.

i'm very critical, but i generally try to criticize a work for what it is, and not for what it isn't. and, as a longtime asimov reader, the question of whether he had women in his stories or not never struck me as relevant, or even interesting.

rereading these, i'm left with the impression of calvin that i think that asimov intended - this is an unsufferable person that few people could like, let alone fantasize about, but that performs the function asimov needs performed. which is what i suspect that he wanted...

so, after some more unwanted sleeping, i have finished the dr. calvin section, which is the biggest part of the book.

i'm going to eat first, do the writeups for these ten short stories and finish the ending part afterwards.

i should be done by the morning at the latest, so i guess i've lost a day. but, this text is also 2-3x the size of the average weekly asimov reading moving forwards.

the major theme in the robot series is the conflict between automation (and what cynical contemporary reactionaries refer to as fully automated luxury communism) and a caricature of the pushback of labour against it.

this breaks the marxist narrative, which is supposed to have the proletariat be in favour of automation, because it frees workers from drudgery. 

but, it's fundamentally a marxist argument - a pure, literal marxist argument.

and, he was more right than marx was. right?

stop.

the hegelian/marxist overtones are blatant. he couldn't have been more heavy-handed.

a classicist may choose to ignore that, or may simply not get it - and insert a pro-religious mythos, instead.

but, isaac asimov was not l ron hubbard - and that reading is wrong.

i also want to take note of the fact that, as i start to move in to the foundation series and concepts like psychohistory, i'm going to be reclaiming asimov as a liberal. i touched upon this a little in my rejection of what i'm calling a misreading of reason. what do i mean?

well, as asimov has worked it's way into classics departments, a predictable false reading of him has become prominent amongst english majors, most of whom might be good at spelling bees but don't have the education required to understand much of what he's talking about, much of the time. and, it seems a lot of them have decided that asimov was secretly a deist, writing a pro-religious mythology, like l. ron hubbard. who knew?

i'm going to be taking a giant leap backwards from that and analyzing asimov from a marxist perspective, instead - which means hauling out the hegel. and, i'm not doing this out of ideological persuasion, or at least not strictly; i honestly think my reading is going to be a more accurate perspective of what was actually going through his head.

so, am i arguing that asimov was a marxist? no - i don't think that's quite right. he was a liberal, which meant he would have had some sympathy for marxism, while presenting a lot of critiques of it. but, that doesn't make him different than the smarter socialists at the time, does it? but, no - i'm not going to advance the theory that asimov was a closet stalinist, so much as i'm going to recognize that he was a liberal intellectual of russo-judaic background operating in the period from 1940-1970 and he consequently would have existed in a liberal-marxist framework, whether he accepted the ideas or not. 

so, the classicists want to interpret him in their worldview, and whatever - that's fine. but, it's exceedingly unlikely that it's what asimov himself was thinking. my hegelian analysis, which is coming, is probably the more correct deconstruction of asimov's actual thinking.

i had to nap this afternoon, so i'm behind schedule, but i certainly think things are balancing out. i'm about half-way through the dr. calvin (the make believe one, not the one he makes fun of in reason) section and i want to stop for a minute to address a specific question: 

are the three robot laws a parody of thermodynamics?

sort of, i think. but, not really - it's more general.

i mean, it's a reasonable hypothesis. asimov was, of course, a chemistry prof. but, i think the three laws of robotics are a more general critique of axiomatic systems, including euclidean geometry, both newtonian and relativistic physics and secular humanism's roots in aquinian natural law theory. the framework is one that's been sort of lost post-heisenberg, but was really at the crux of the historical debate between science (which was not logical, but empirical) and philosophy (which was strictly logical, and disinterested in empiricism). with the retreat of physics from strict empiricism to largely unfalsifiable theoretical models, and the more recent embrace of empiricism by any philosopher worth listening to, this distinction has been blurred. nowadays, we tend to lump philosophy & science in together in the "pro-reason" category and throw away religion as "irrational" or "emotional". and, this has taken on, like, greek overtones of masculine v feminism, which is daft. but, that wasn't the world asimov lived in - he would have seen science and what was called the british school (which actually included marx as well as darwin and bacon and turing and the rest) on one side of this, and the broad swath of philosophical doctrine, which included both religion and mathematics, on the other side of it.

you also have to realize that asimov was very much the archetype of the self-deprecating science nerd, and he was perfectly content to make fun of himself, if it resulted in a good punchline. it's a mark of a mature writer, and especially of a liberal one in the 1900-1950 period, that people often miss - he's offering a lot of criticism of ideas he supports, because he's not trying to advance an argument so much as he's trying to push the needle forward. it's actually a black mark on our own era that the idea of somebody being more concerned about the general advancement of knowledge than he is about personal ideological bickering comes off as bizarre and unrealistic. but, you see this with the likes of asimov, russell, sagan - they're just not driven by their egos, so they don't care if they're right or not, and are happy to admit they were wrong. so, they invite a critique of their own ideas to try to strengthen them. we'd do well to get back to that, both in science and on the left.

when i was a math student, i spent an unusually large amount of time on axiomatic systems, so i sort of get this a bit better than most. i had to make the same point of correction when we did gulliver's travels in the science fiction course i took years ago, because i was able to identify a critique of pythagoreanism that most people today would have missed for a critique of "science", entirely - but that would have been painfully obvious to swift's contemporary audience. 

what asimov does with the three laws is actually relatively soluble and transferable, and he's consequently able to use the mechanism to criticize a wide variety of applications of logic in place of empirical study. it's that general critique of reason (in a very non-kantian sense) that is what he's on about, not a specific critique of the laws of thermodynamics. i actually haven't come across a story that is specifically about thermodynamics quite yet, but i'm sure one is coming.

and, hey - if you can disprove thermodynamics, go for it. nobody's succeeded yet, right?

everybody knows it's all wrong, though - and it has to be, because it's axiomatic.

but, that wasn't asimov's primary point - asimov's primary point was that belief is irrelevant in the face of evidence, and you can't believe away the truth.

so, if we want to be absolutely certain that robots are easy to control, even when we're not around, should we program them to obey religion?

well, it works when the elite do it to us.

but, i might worry we'd get more than we'd hope for - as the elite frequently have. 

if you're an aristocratic elitist, religion might look nice on paper as a tool to keep the masses in line with, but history is full of fairly violent blowback, and i might suggest the approach ought to actually be abandoned.

part V contains stories about "powell and donovan" which is a team of space cowboys going on various adventures around the solar system, and interacting with robots, as they do. if r2d2 and c3p0 are typical asimovian robots, these are your solo and chewbacca. and, i'm not the first person to figure that out.

lucas inverted the relationship, though. while solo is a spitting image of the dumbard in the group (donovan), the smart one, powell, was replaced by the wookie. replacing the smart one in the team with an incomprehensible ball of fur is really typical of the dumbing down in science fiction that lucas is responsible for. but, i'm just here to observe, i'm not here to condemn.

so, that's what these stories are, and you will no doubt instantly recognize hans solo in donovan, if you're under the age of 65.

asimov had previously tried this formula out with the callistan menace and would pick it back up again in his robot novels.

- 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.

- runaround: 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.

- reason: 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.

- catch that rabbit: 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.

next up is part IV - some humanoid robots. these are stories about androids.

- let's get together: 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...

- mirror image: 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.

- 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.

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.

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.

- robbie: 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. 

i'm going to try to keep the radio mentions to tracks i specifically recall.

name-dropping love and rockets as an 8-year old might seem pretentious, but that track actually literally technically topped the charts, here. it's not a stretch to call it the song of the summer - it was in every restaurant, in every car, in every grocery store - it was that kind of thing. yes, i'm talking about so alive by love and rockets, which was a minor hit elsewhere in the anglosphere but a massive, smash hit in canada.

likewise, i explicitly remember seeing this video and being baffled by it. 

what is this? a song? a play?

what the actual fuck?

i've mentioned before, though, that my actual opinion of prince at that age was that he was kind of ....gross.

and, it's easy to pull that out of this as well.

but, that's the kind of mind fuck i want to take note of, as an impressionable young child, and will be the component in the next update.

so, i had a teeth cleaning, today, and it sort of cut my day in half. but i got some rest - no random orgasm. finally. - and hope to get almost or all of this done by the morning.

i would normally want to do a couple of books a week, but this one is pretty big - bigger than your average asimov text, anyways. i'm fearful that i'll be running in spot if i just focus on catching up, so i need to ensure i'm back on schedule by saturday morning.

the music is the primary priority, and the reading only fits into the puzzle, right now, in terms of the broader liner note narrative. you might interpret this as more interesting than the music, and that's your decision. i'm cognizant of the truth that my writing seems to generate more interest than my compositions, even if it's not what i'd rather be the case. but, understand that, in my mind, i'm writing a summary of my childhood in the context of my existence, as a musician. this would not be of interest to me, otherwise.

so, there's one more story in section III to type up.

frankly, i might suggest that the actual master race is the jews.

i mean, if you want to insist on defining such a silly thing, in the first place; that's where the evidence really actually is.

so, what's the deal with asimov and eugenics?

asimov was a liberal jew operating in boston, but he was also an american with ideological roots in the progressive movement, which is where hitler's racial hygiene ideas originated from. that's a point glossed over by history - the theory of the master race was invented at stanford by progressives, not in some dank basement by nietzsche, who was thinking of something else, entirely.

so, asimov is a hydra on eugenics, for that reason - he is both a jew living through world war two and a period progressive.

in strict terms, eugenics means improvement of the human genome, and if you interpret that literally, it's hard to be overly critical of the idea. it's when you look at specific applications that the idea gets controversial, but you have to realize that there's a pretty good argument that wiping out the jews - who tend to actually be pretty smart - isn't much of an improvement at all, but rather actually kind of a bad idea. further, what we know about genetics nowadays is that race and intelligence aren't correlated. at all. in fact, race doesn't even exist as a definable concept, from a genetic standpoint - it's an irrelevant allele, in any meaningful sense. it's, like, three genes, and what it codes for is pretty unimportant.

but, then you look at things like autism (or tay-sachs) and you end up with a set of more complicated questions to ponder. asimov is generally critical of the sorts of ideas that you hear from advocates of eugenics, but he leaves open a lot of questions about potential legitimate applications of eugenics that genuinely reflects the state of the science at the time. if you don't actually know what autism even is, how can you suggest a solution to it? so, he frequently presents these nazi-lite characters and broadly frames their views in a negative manner, but he very rarely outright condemns them. there's this subtlety there that makes you wonder what he's really thinking.

as stated above, i don't have an opposition to the basic premise of improving the human race, but i think we have to understand what that actually means before we try and act upon it. if you're concerned about science or literature, it should be clear that killing all of the jews would be a massive negation to the genome. it should also be clear that sterilizing africans isn't going to have the outcome that race theorists of the last century hypothesized that it might. we know today that autism can be inherited from autistic parents but is generally actually a random error in real time that isn't predictable ahead of fertilization - it's an example of the error rate in random mutations asserting itself in the process of evolution. but, there are things (like tay-sachs) that...yeah...we'd be better off deleting, and can probably actually succeed in deleting.

when asimov discusses eugenics, he does so frankly, with the intent of generating an open discussion, and while he isn't always clear in stating his disapproval of inappropriate uses, it's nonetheless obvious that he's only in support of the kind of eugenics that may eliminate conditions like tay-sachs, and isn't in favour of any scientifically unsound theories of racial supremacy. 

but, as is so often the case, he frequently fails to develop the point enough, and he leaves himself open to unfair criticism as a result of it.

- light verse: 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.

- segregationist: 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.

the third section - some metallic robots - is much longer, and i'm going to split it into two sections, as i stop to eat.

- robot al-76 goes astray: 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.

- victory unintentional: 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.

- 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.

i have not seen the will smith film, btw, and am not interested in it.

i only vaguely recall it's existence, at the time.

the second section - some immobile robots - is a fairly short section and deals with the overlap between computers and robots. sort of. i mean, in principle, but not really, not actually. these were all written in the 70s, and are not asimov's most insightful pieces, to say the least.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

i have a physical text of the complete robot, so i'll be reading it in bed, which was the intent, and should eliminate some distractions. what is this, exactly?

asimov suggested starting with i, robot when asked, but he wrote quite a bit after that suggestion, and he left quite a bit out. it's for that reason that i started with the early asimov, instead. now that that's done with, i, robot is the author's suggested starting point, or at least was.

in 1982, asimov published an update to i, robot called the complete robot that was actually comprehensive, in terms of robot stories, at least up until 1982. the sequence in i, robot is not disturbed but several texts are inserted in between the existing sequence. further, the text is split into six thematic sections.

so, the way i'm going to do this is to read a section and then come over to write it up. 

the first section is called some non-human robots and has three stories published after the publication of i, robot - two from the 50s and one from the late 70s.

before i do this, i should point out that asimov does remain incredibly relevant, as automation starts to filter out of the factory and into our every day lives. he was perhaps the first person to really address these concerns in a concrete way that is directly applicable to contemporary reality, and the basic crux of the subject matter has changed very little in the last 70-80 years, except to point out that we're just barely catching up to where he imagined we might be, 50 years earlier. so, we're substantively behind his schedule. but, that means he's still relevant, because we haven't truly gotten there yet.

so, as some of these stories could very well have been written last week, i'm going to approach a lot of them as though they were.

while you might not have read all or any of the original versions of these texts, as they developed from asimov's pen, most people sorting through a collection like this will recognize most of these plotlines, via second or third or eighth generation adaptations, either within derivative works of science fiction or via derivative works in a number of related genres, like horror and fantasy.

- 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.

- sally: 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.

- someday: 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.

ok.

so, if i were to jump back into the schedule, i'd be working on the blog stuff until thursday night. i'm, instead, going to jump right back into the alter-reality, and intend to get back to the music on saturday morning.

can i get through 600 pages of robot stories between now and then?

the truth is that it depends on how well i can stay awake.

i think the testosterone schwing is done with now, so let's hope i'm awake for a bit

i got my doctor to prescribe 25s for a while. so let's try to take it down again when i get through the existing rx, which will be the end of october, probably.

ok.

so, this took way too long:

https://thejournalofj.blogspot.com/1989/08/the-early-asimov.html

i initially wanted to catch up first, but that's going to take a very long time. so, i want to click back into the schedule, instead.

so, i'm going to keep a running total of this, as best i can.

the next step is to write the blog entry for 1989, which is going to be written from the perspective of an eight year-old and won't feature nearly as in depth commentary. this is the split nature of this.

this is a comprehensive list of early stories, including ones that were skipped now.

- marooned off vesta: not in this collection. asimov does not look at this fondly and a quick perusal suggests there is nothing to it.

- the weapon too dreadful to use: 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: 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.’ “

.

.

.

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: 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: in the complete robot, which is the next text.

- homo sol: 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: 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: 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: the complete robot.

- liar: the complete robot.

- nightfall: the complete stories, which is third up. and, this is classic enough that it made it to a university course i took once on science fiction - this is the one they picked. soon.

- 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.

- not final!: empty plot. throwaway.

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

- robot al-76 goes astray: the complete robot

- runaround: the complete robot

- black friar of the flame: 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: in foundation, which is a ways down the list

- bridle and saddle: foundation

- victory unintentional: the complete robot

- 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.

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: 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: 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 - the complete robot

- the big & the little, the wedge - foundation

- 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.

- dead hand: foundation and empire

- escape: the complete robot

- the mule: foundation and empire

- evidence the complete  robot

- little lost robot: the complete robot

- now you see it: second foundation

- the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline: this is just utter silliness.

- no connection: 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: 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: 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: second foundation

- 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: the complete robot

- 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.

(...)

- 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.

- mother earth: 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.

if i hadn't been forced to sleep this off all weekend, i'd be done by now, but there's one more of these before i turn to the write-up and pivot.

as mentioned repeatedly, i am not voting tomorrow.

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.

- red queen's race: 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 endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline: this is just utter silliness.

picnic baskets, of course, provide for a high protein diet, as well.

i'm just applying the theory.

it actually appears to be ten years before the cartoon, though. so, hey.

it is the bears that are smarter than the average ones that will survive and reproduce.

i would presume that bear intelligence did, in fact, evolve in yellowstone park.

- no connection: 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- homo sol: federation entrance. besides being disparaging towards humans in an empty manner, the plot has no apparent purpose. this one is throwaway.

- the secret sense: 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.

- half-breed: 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...

- black friar of the flame: 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.

with all of the boomer-bashing that's been going on since punk rock, it's interesting to go back and read what the generations before the boomers felt was coming in that period.

while it risks defining history on their terms (which is what they want and expect...), a lot of writers of the period got the basic point right.

my progress got slowed down by sleeping too much and i'll need to correct that to pick it up.

but, here's a few notes on the first few stories as i focus on some other things for the day.

i need to pick up the pace, clearly.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- trends: 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.’ “

.

.

.

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.

- the weapon too dreadful to use: 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.

i've got a start on this, and these stories are...

pointless.

they're chronological, and i'll have to see if they get more substantive over time. 

you can tell a meaningful story in 20 pages if you lay on the symbolism or technical imagination, but none of these ones are doing that, yet.

this kid's going to teach you about the 90s:

https://thejournalofj.blogspot.com/p/playlists.html

alright, so let's get this going, then.

i don't know how long this is going to take, but i'm going to keep at it until it's done. one post per book per week. let's go...

first off:

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

i've finally got the bandage off my scrotum, and there's still a few stitches in there, but it seems to have largely healed. so, i should be able to wear normal clothes again (i've been wearing these loose fitting pajama pants when i go out) and get back on my bicycle when i go out next. and, i'm going to take a good ride to the goodwill book store soon...

so, here's my 1989 playlist, which i'm going to be listening to as i do this writing, and which i may pare down substantively. i'll pull some of the things that are more important out; i think you can probably guess what most of them are going to be, and it's not necessarily the stuff i'd still point to as substantive.

you can hear that my little brain was mostly interested in 60s retro, and not contemporary 80s music, even if it didn't understand it. but, i was also looking forwards to the styles that would dominate the early to mid 90s. i had no interest in the music marketed to kids in those days, and while the gender imbalance isn't that bad given the sources i had, it is indeed overwhelmingly white. but, i mean, i'm pretty white, too. that changes a little as i age, but not a lot....

as mentioned, i didn't even have a cassette deck at the time. no walkman. nothing. i had an alarm clock, and the alarm clock had a radio. i had a tv, with access to muchmusic. that was it. and, i had parents with music collections, which i mostly hadn't raided, yet. i've mentioned before that i got my first rem dubs by taking the tapes out of the library. i knew some of the names, but i was exposed to much of what my mom listened to and didn't like really any of it, while my dad's collection was esoteric and difficult, and would be for most eight year-olds. that will be a running narrative, but not yet. 

my dad liked a little u2 (mostly due to the eno thing) and my mom had some older 70s glam that was less terrible than the 80s stuff, but neither of them listened to the student rock i listened to from about the ages of 8-12 and neither would have had much interest in 90% of what's compiled, here. you can get a good taste of what's coming from 1990-1993 or so, when i started to switch over to punk and industrial. 

i will review some of the records these tracks are on when i get the ghetto blaster after christmas, but i will be selective. i'm going to need to do a comprehensive survey of tears for fears, for sure. 

fuck, i forgot how good this was:

i'm building a 1989 playlist.

i didn't know it at the time, but it actually sounds more like 1969 than 1989.

i was eight years old, but i clearly had about as good taste as an eight year-old can have.

how honest is this, really? it's stretching mildly - i didn't get into some of this until i was more like 10.

there's a lot of canadiana on there.

well, i lived in canada.

i have very early memories of bruce cockburn, actually.

a lot of this is probably his fault.

ok, so this is a shortlist of items i pulled from the canadian charts from 1989 that's likely to be of some significance: 

4 4 14 Big League-Tom Cochrane & Red Rider

 14 14 15 Desire-U2

18 18 11 In Your Room-Bangles

19 24 9 Five Long Years-Colin James

10 22 8 Smooth Criminal-Michael Jackson

14 11 13 I Don't Want Your Love-Duran Duran

20 40 4 Angel Of Harlem-U2

20 26 7 Born To Be My Baby-Bon Jovi

20 24 7 Tell Somebody-Sass Jordan

17 26 6 The Living Years-Mike & The Mechanics

20 22 9 Send Your Love-Glass Tiger

20 29 9 If A Tree Falls-Bruce Cockburn

 9 18 8 Good Times-Tom Cochrane

14 22 8 Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)-Enya

 11 7 13 My Heart Can't Tell You No-Rod Stewart

13 28 7 Eternal Flame-The Bangles

16 25 8 She Drives Me Crazy-Fine Young Cannibals

15 23 6 The Look-Roxette

18 31 3 Like A Prayer-Madonna

12 27 8 Girl You Know It's True-Milli Vanilli

15 25 10 Stand-R.E.M.

19 28 5 Diamond Mine-Blue Rodeo

13 25 8 I'LL BE THERE FOR YOU-Bon Jovi

18 28 8 DOUBLE TROUBLE-Sass Jordan

20 24 8 ANGEL EYES-Jeff Healey Band

18 26 8 I WON'T BACK DOWN-Tom Petty

10 22 6 SATISFIED-Richard Marx

19 30 9 LOVE IS-Alannah Myles

19 35 7 IF YOU DON'T KNOW ME BY NOW-Simply Red

20 31 5 BABY DON'T FORGET MY NUMBER-Milli Vanilli

10 22 5 EXPRESS YOURSELF-Madonna

11 59 3 BATDANCE-Prince

12 8 14 I WON'T BACK DOWN-Tom Petty

15 24 6 SO ALIVE-Love & Rockets

16 26 5 END OF INNOCENCE-Don Henley

17 22 7 CRAZY ABOUT HER-Rod Stewart

20 23 8 DRESSED FOR SUCCESS-Roxette

12 24 6 ROCK N ROLL DUTY-Kim Mitchell

20 27 10 LAY YOUR HANDS ON ME-Bon Jovi

 1 3 7 RIGHT HERE WAITING-RICHARD MARX

 19 22 7 ALL THE THINGS I WASN'T-Grapes Of Wrath

20 21 10 BLACK VELVET-Alannah Myles

 7 19 6 GIRL I'M GONNA MISS YOU-Milli Vanilli

18 45 3 SOWING THE SEEDS OF LOVE-Tears For Fears

19 26 5 LOVE SONG-Cure

16 24 7 LISTEN TO YOUR HEART-Roxette

 18 25 7 NO SOUVENIRS-Melissa Etheridge

15 19 5 ANGELIA-Richard Marx

16 29 8 LOVE SHACK-B52s

10 25 3 ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE-Phil Colliins

13 21 9 DON'T ASK ME WHY-Eurythmics

17 7 14 CHERISH-Madonna

18 34 5 HEY MEN-Men Without Hats

10 15 6 WE DIDN'T START THE FIRE-Billy Joel

16 24 10 ROCKLAND WONDERLAND-Kim Mitchell

18 26 6 BLAME IT ON THE RAIN-Milli Vanilli

18 18 6 FREE FALLIN'-Tom Petty

i don't know how to make this comprehensive, given how young i was and that i can barely remember.

i also found the muchmusic charts and pulled these out:

 3 The Jeff Healey Band - Confidence Man 

 4 Colin James - Voodoo Thing 

25 Bon Jovi - Bad Medicine 

30 Glass Tiger - Far Away From Here

25 Duran Duran - All She Wants Is 

12 Michael Jackson - Leave Me Alone 

18 Tom Cochrane & Red Rider - Good Times 

29 Colin James - Why'd You Lie 

27 Glass Tiger - Watching Worlds Crumble 

27 The Cult - Fire Woman 

29 Cowboy Junkies - Misguided Angel 

28 Tom Cochrane & Red Rider - Victory Day 

28 Tin Machine - Under the God 

24 Roxette - Dressed For Success 

11 Neil Young - Rockin' In The Free World 

22 Eurythmics - Don't Ask Me Why 

29 Sass Jordan - So Hard 

 Bon Jovi - Living In Sin 

12 Alannah Myles - Still Got This Thing 

13 Madonna - Oh Father 

22 Rod Stewart - Downtown Train 

24 Richard Marx - Angelia 

26 Tom Petty - Free Fallin' 

27 Tragically Hip - New Orleans Is Sinking 

29 Tears for Fears - Woman In Chains 

30 Eurythimics - Angel

i will not explore all of these, but i'll look at a few.