Read Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition) Online

Authors: James Gunn

Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition) (19 page)

The story contains fascinating speculations about the evolutionary development of a herbivore and about how this might affect psychological and social adaptations. The underlying tension between cyanide-breathers and oxygen-breathers, between herbivores and carnivores, erupts in a grisly scene in which Tholan is deprived of his cyanide by Drake and forced to talk. Tholan reveals a theory that he has not yet shared with anyone else: only Earthmen are immune to the Inhibition Death. He thinks the Inhibition Death is caused by a parasitic kind of life native to Earth that kills when it is spread to aliens who are not adapted to it. He thinks the parasite is spread by young men who disappear into space, but that it must return to Earth to reproduce by using some intermediate host. Drake restores Tholan's cyanide and then kills him.
When Rose questions him, Drake reveals that Tholan was right, but he insists that the parasite has become symbiotic and is indispensable to humanity's existence, that the absence of the parasite is called cancer. To get rid of the parasite, extraterrestrials would have to eliminate all human life. Drake leaves with Tholan's body, and Rose realizes that he has lied to her, perhaps to avoid killing her. Cancer could not be the absence of the parasite, since it is present in many other kinds of living things. And she realizes too that young men who disappear into space usually do so in the first year of marriage, that the parasite must require close and continuous association with another parasite in order to reproduce, that Drake will not be returning, and that she has been a hostess. She also knows now why Drake married her.
The story differs from earlier Asimov stories, and from most later ones, for several reasons. One is its complexity; it is difficult to summarize. Second, its primary motivation is not so much the solution of a physical puzzle but the answer to the question of why Drake is behaving so strangely. Its development is one in which a character changes: Rose moves from puzzled happiness to misery. Knowledge, which usually brings satisfaction if not always success in the Asimov story, is no consolation for Rose. And third, the conclusion is ambiguous. Asimov seldom leaves the reader in doubt about the outcome of the situation, but in this story many threads are left dangling. If Drake lied to Rose,
what is the truth about the parasite and the Inhibition Death? Will other aliens deduce the truth and descend upon Earth to wipe out the Terran hosts? Will Rose be able to convince her colleagues at the Institute about the parasite, will they launch a research program, and can the parasite be isolated and destroyed? Is the parasite capable of directing human activities, and did it direct Drake's? And so forth. What the story loses in clarity, however, it gains in human resonances. Asimov did not write this kind of story often.
Astounding
published the next Asimov story, "Breeds There a Man. . .?" (June 1951), which is related to "Hostess" in its lack of a definitive ending. A scientific genius working on a force field that could prevent the civilization-destroying effects of an atomic war fears that he will kill himself. He blames this urge to commit suicide on extraterrestrials who are using Earthmen for an experiment and do not want humanity to advance too far. Eventually, at the cost of his health and then his life, the scientist perfects the force shield, leaving unanswered the question of whether his ideas about extraterrestrial manipulation were correct.
Asimov's next story in
Galaxy
"C-Chute" (October 1951), was a response to the Korean War, as was "Breeds There a Man. . .?" Both dealt with alien threats to humanity. "C-Chute" also was a bit different from the usual Asimov story, focusing more on character, in this case a group of non-combatant strays in a spaceship captured by aliens. The Terrans quarrel about how to behave toward their captors and about the proper action to take in their circumstances. Finally, the least likely of the group, a precise, mild-mannered bookkeeper for a paper-box company, puts on a spacesuit and makes his way through the C-chute (used to dispose of battle casualties). He goes back through the steam cylinders that control the ship's attitude and into the chlorine-filled alien atmosphere in order to kill the two aliens and reclaim the ship.
"In a Good Cause," which Asimov wrote for the first anthology of original science fiction, Raymond J. Healy's
New Tales of Space and Time
(1951), was cited by Asimov as an example of how an author can sometimes write stories that advocate positions the author does not share. Two friends, Richard Altmayer and Geoffrey Stock, take different routes to meet a challenge of competition from herbivorous, communal aliens. Because the aliens have horns and exhale hydrogen sulfide, Earthmen have named them Diaboli. [Asimov's use of the Diaboli illustrates the dangers of influence-tracing. A scholar noting the similarity of the Diaboli to Arthur C. Clarke's Overlords in his 1953 novel
Childhood's End
might conclude that Clarke was inspired by Asimov. The
Overlords, however, were presented first in a story entitled "Guardian Angel" published in 1950, which was expanded into
Childhood's End.
Both stories, as a matter of fact, may owe a debt to John W. Campbell's 1934
Astounding
serial,
The Mightiest Machine.
] Altmayer becomes a draft resister, later a radical leader. Stock becomes a soldier and then a leading politician. In a series of scattered incidents, Stock uses Altmayer to achieve just the opposite of what Altmayer himself intended to achieve. But each incident prepares the way for the time when at last Earth attacks the Diaboli and defeats them by preventing the other human-settled planets from taking their side. Humanity can expand into the galaxy. In a final irony, Altmayer is released from prison to represent Earth in a United Worlds organization. Altmayer will have a statue raised to him; Stock will be forgotten.
It seems likely that Asimov did not so much object to the irony in the evaluation of history as to the Machiavellian way in which Stock used Altmayer to achieve his ends and the way in which he slaughtered the Diaboli in the name of human expansion. Asimov's fiction usually followed his convictions, but sometimes, as he pointed out in his autobiography, a story would take the bit in its teeth.
"The Martian Way" (
Galaxy,
November 1952) is quintessential Asimov. It survived a request for extensive revision by Gold (Asimov held Gold's requested changes to the insertion of a woman character) to become one of the twenty-two novellas included in
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume II.
The inspiration for the story came out of the Joseph McCarthy era. "It dealt," Asimov wrote in his autobiography, "with Martian colonists with a problem, who were victimized out of a solution by a McCarthy-style politician and who were in this way forced to find a still better solution." When it appeared, Asimov "thought that the story would elicit a mass of mail denouncing my own portrayal of McCarthyism, or supporting it, but I got nothing either one way or the other. It may be that my satire of McCarthy was so subtle that everyone missed it."
The satire was not that subtle. The "McCarthy-style politician," named John Hilder, is making political capital on Earth out of opposition to space travel, which is costing a great deal of money, he says, for a small return. In particular, he rouses the rabble against letting Martian colonists take Earth's water, which is used mostly for reaction mass. [The situation of Asimov's first
Astounding
story, "Trends," has progressed both in stage of development and sophistication: spaceflight has moved into the colonization stage and opposition to spaceflight has moved from fundamental religious groups to politicians.] The amount
of water used by the colonists is relatively small, but Hilder's campaign succeeds in getting even that closed off. One Martian colonist, Rioz, suggests that the Martians simply take the water, stealthily or by force, from Earth's oceans. But another, Long, says that this is Earth way, the Grounder way, "trying to hold on to the umbilical cord that binds Mars to Earth." The Martian way is to look farther out, where ninety-nine percent of the rest of the matter in the solar system is to be found, including vast amounts of water. Eventually, despite great difficulties, a group of rocket pilots from Mars, whose normal job is reclaiming the metal "shells" or stages left in orbit by ships that have used up their reaction masses, fits a gigantic iceberg from the rings of Saturn with rocket jets and brings it back to Mars.
As the mountain of ice is lowered to the surface of Mars, the committee from Earth led by John Hilder is faced with the humiliation of the Martian colonists offering to sell water to Earth. Hilder sees his own political future turning to water along with the campaign rhetoric of his political party, the anti-Wasters. The Martian way is to accept spaceflight as natural, even to consider planets as a kind of spaceship. [Asimov previsions in this story not only "spaceship Earth" but also a later proposal to tow icebergs from the Antarctic to provide supplies of fresh water.] Eventually, "it will be Martians, not planet-bound Earthmen, who will colonize the Galaxy." That too is the Martian way.
"Sucker Bait" (
Astounding,
February, March 1954) is a novella about the failure of a colony on a pleasant, Earth-type planet called Junior. A ship is sent to discover what went wrong. One member of the expedition is temperamental Mark Annuncio of the Mnemonic Service, a young man whose ability to remember everything he has ever read makes him an invaluable resource in a galaxy with nearly 100,000 inhabited planets, where all sorts of information can be lost. He also has hunches based on the correlation of information he has memorized. One correlation leads him to a violent course of action that forces the crew off the planet in a hurry. Annuncio and the man nominally responsible for him, Oswald Mayer Sheffield, are placed on shipboard trial for mutiny and are almost railroaded into a death sentence. Finally, Sheffield persuades the crew to hear Annuncio's testimony. Annuncio reveals that the danger on Junior is in the dust: it contains beryllium that kills by deranging enzymatic reactions. The crew might all be doomed. [Annuncio's intuition may anticipate Golan Trevise's "right" decisions in
Foundation's Edge
and
Foundation and Earth.
]
"Dreaming Is a Private Thing" (
Fantasy and Science Fiction,
December 1955) describes a new art form, the creation of dreamies by means of a
dream recorder that picks up thoughts, which then can be distributed to consumers. The story proceeds as a day in the life of the manager of Dream, Inc. The manager tests a ten-year-old boy as a potential dreamer and tries to persuade the boy's parents to allow him to be trained. He talks to an agent of the Department of Arts and Sciences (a prevision of the National Endowment for the Arts?) about pornographic dreamies, discusses competition with another company, Luster-Think, that has opened up dream palaces for public dreaming, and deals with a dreamer who wants to quit. It is a quiet, well-modulated story that suggests many of the possibilities implicit in a world where dreams become a commodity. It is presented as a series of small human problems rather than a mystery or puzzle.
"The Dead Past" (
Astounding,
April 1956) deals with a new science, chronoscopy time-viewing by means of an invention called the chronoscope. T.L. Sherred's "E for Effort" (
Astounding,
May 1947) had been the definitive statement on the discovery of a method for viewing the past. In that story a couple of poor inventors first use their camera-like device to film documentaries, then historical spectaculars, and finally attempt to bring peace to the world. They are stopped by a sudden government attack when it becomes apparent that nothing can be kept secret now that not only any time but any place can be viewed; without secrets all government is endangered.
Asimov returned to that concept in "The Dead Past," in the best tradition of the science-fiction dialogue, suggesting that chronoscopy would be so expensive that only the government could afford it; use of the machines would be rationed. A history professor, who is refused the opportunity to view Carthage, urges a young colleague to invent his own chronoscope. The young man does, but there are problems. [The well-written science-fiction story never presents an invention without its associated problems, a dramatic principle that H.G. Wells popularized in
The Invisible Man.
As Heinlein frequently quoted in his fiction, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch," abbreviated as "Tanstaafl."] In the first place, viewing becomes impossibly fuzzy after going back a century and a quarter because of loss of detail. In the second place, people such as the history professor's wife, whose baby was killed in a fire that the professor accidentally may have started, would spend their time reliving the past. In the third and final place, if chronoscopes became cheap enough for everyone to own one, people would be able to spy on their neighbors and anyone else they might choose to watch. Privacy would become a thing of the past. The story ends with a
government spokesman, who has been considered a villain, unable to suppress the broad release of the invention.
The depiction of a government acting responsibly to suppress an invention with major social implications must have appealed to Campbell as a reversal of
Astounding'
s traditional position in favor of freedom of thought, inquiry, and publication. The government agent says, ". . . you all just took it for granted that the government was stupidly bureaucratic, vicious, tyrannical, given to suppressing research for the hell of it. It never occurred to any of you that we were trying to protect mankind as best we could." The story no doubt appealed to Asimov, too, as an example of how social considerations should influence scientific decisions.
"Profession" (
Astounding,
July 1957) considers a future Earth where skills are imprinted electronically on the brain. A society has grown up to prepare young people for this event, which will be important to Earth, the mother planet of a group of more prosperous and more powerful colonies. Earth specializes in the production of education tapes, which it sells to the other planets, and also exports tape-imprinted skilled workers. The process helps to keep the Galactic culture unified. George Platen, the protagonist of the story, is told that his "mind is not suited to receiving a superimposed knowledge of any sort." He struggles against his fate as he becomes a ward of the planet and is sent to be with others of his kind in a place that he is told finally is "A House for the Feeble Minded." After escaping and trying to make a place for himself in the world of the educable, however, Platen discovers that he is one of the elite, one of the few who have the capacity for original thought, who invent the new instrument models and make the educational tapes. The system used to deceive him is defended as necessary both to protect the majority from considering themselves failures and to identify the creative minority who refuse to accept what they have been told. "It is much safer," one character explains, to wait for a man to say, ''I can create, and I will do so whether you wish it or not." But the justification for deception remains a bit unconvincing; it seems more like Campbell's idea than Asimov's.
Finally came one of Asimov's best-known and, by many, best-loved stories, "The Ugly Little Boy" (
Galaxy,
September 1958). The work illustrates the two basic kinds of story development: one presents the protagonist with a problem or a series of problems that he or she must solve, the other introduces a character and places that character under a stress that changes him or her. Asimov seldom wrote the second kind of story. In an interview, he said. "I don't know that I have the kind of 
literary power that is required for that sort of thing. I can deal with rational action, but I'm not sure that I can deal with the inner recesses of being." Asimov restricted himself almost entirely to the problem-solving story, though his variations often end with the identification of a problem rather than its solution, as in "The Dead Past" or "Profession." To identify the problem, according to the logic of Asimov's fiction and perhaps his personal beliefs, was to perceive its solution, or to perceive that it was incapable of solution and must be lived with, as in "Nightfall.'' But even in "Nightfall," it is better to know, for with knowledge comes some kind of reward, even triumph.

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