jsburbidge (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jsburbidge) wrote2014-01-09 12:50 pm
jsburbidge) wrote2014-01-09 12:50 pm
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Isaac Asimov
Asimov is back in the news, largely because he made some predictions about 2014 in 1964.
In 1964, Asimov also published his second collection of robot stories, The Rest of the Robots. Aside from the novelization of Fantastic Voyage (1966), his next book of science fiction was The Gods Themselves in 1972, and he did not resume novel-writing an a more regular basis until 1982, with Foundation's Edge, when he started to extend the Foundation series and then join it up with the robots stories. (He did publish many mystery short stories about the Black Widowers during the period.)
I grew up reading science fiction between about 1968 or so and 1978 (arbitrarily chosen as a terminus when I entered university and "was grown" and my reading patterns changed). So when I was growing up Asimov was basically a science (and pop history, etc.) writer who used to write SF. (The Gods Themselves appeared just before I was in high school, and included a relatively refreshing attempt to imagine genuinely alien aliens, although it was otherwise very Asmovian -- and relatively dull -- in its human parts of the story: see Jo Walton's review of it.) For me, the definitive Asimov stories were from before 1960; and I think that this is still true.
He had been assigned a place for some time as one of the three most important living SF writers, along with Clarke and Heinlein. But it wasn't for the depth of his characterisation (nonexistent), or even the complexity of his plots. And despite what's sometimes said, it wasn't particularly representative of "hard" SF: his two most characteristic innovations, the positronic robots and the discipline of psychohistory, are both handwaves which are, under any close examination, completely implausible. (The positronic robots are doubly implausible, once at a physical level (how do we avoid a matter/antimatter meltdown?) and once at an AI level (how do we encode complicated concepts like the three laws in the first place?).) Instead, both of them provided a broad setting for stories which used plot twists to create surprise endings or plot reversals. The same was true of the time travel in The End of Eternity.
His later turning of his earlier stories into episodes in a broad future history with R. Daneel Olivaw as a linking character was misconceived, although they sold well. The patching-up was clunky and extraneous to the themes and structure of the earlier stories. And he ended up relying heavily on telepathy as a plot device (he had already introduced it in the Foundation series with the Mule, and the Robots stories with "Liar!" (from 1941)), which moves the work firmly away from Science Fiction and towards Fantasy, regardless of the Campbellian grandfathering of psionics into SF.
In addition, the optimism of the post-war America which had permeated the earlier stories was gone. (Foundation and Doc Smith's First Lensman, from this distance, both look more like the 1950s than the future.) If psychohistory had been held out as a good thing (assuming it were possible) in the early stories, the later ones are less sure. The absence of a leisure society with the help of robots was explained away by making the Spacers a "dead end" (to explain (away) the Empire as Asimov had originally shown it).
I can't think of any ex post facto attempt to tie everything together that has really worked -- it was one of the major problems with Heinlein's later books, from The Number of the Beast on, as well. If you start with a plan to connect everything, that's one thing. Patching in an odd work (like the incorporation of Triplanetary after the fact by rewriting it) can work. But grafting differently-conceived works, and, even more, universes, together is an invitation to trouble.
There are problems with Asimov's work which were more-or-less invisible at the time but became more obvious as it aged. It was thoroughly sexist, in a way that blended into the background in the 1950s, but became glaring by the turn of the century; and this never really went away, even in the later books, although he added more realistic women in the later books. (Asimov's personal sexism / harassment patterns play into this.) What felt like purely neutral, invisible, prose at the time has also (inevitably) taken on a patina of age.
His influence has long been integrated into the field. It's hard to remember now, but the idea of robots was less than 20 years old when he wrote his first positronic robot story (1939 for "Robbie" -- Capek's R.U.R. dates from 1920) and the model of non-threatening robots he introduced has long been drawn on in other works, some closer (there are relatively many authorized stories in the "early" robots universe by other authors) and some more removed from his original model. And it's possible to argue that the many all-human space kingdoms / empires of later space opera draw some of their inspiration from the background to the Foundation books. Psychohistory is less of an influence, aside from works such as Psychohistorical Crisis which are direct homages, although one can see Dickson's William of Ceta as someone making a failed attempt to use a similar discipline (critiqued towards the end of Dorsai! by Donal Graeme).
I suspect that Asimov's works have "aged" (in the sense of becoming more alien) about as much as they're ever going to -- what survives now will continue to be read, more or less as the best of Verne's novels do -- at least by those interested in the roots of SF. This is assisted by the fact that much of his better work was short stories, which show off his plot twist model far better than longer works (even the early "novels" in the Foundation series are really collections of novellas). (One of the problems with his later work was that he took to writing longer novels which showcased his plotting techniques less effectively; they're loosely episodic in structure some feel a bit as though they are held together by duct tape.)
In 1964, Asimov also published his second collection of robot stories, The Rest of the Robots. Aside from the novelization of Fantastic Voyage (1966), his next book of science fiction was The Gods Themselves in 1972, and he did not resume novel-writing an a more regular basis until 1982, with Foundation's Edge, when he started to extend the Foundation series and then join it up with the robots stories. (He did publish many mystery short stories about the Black Widowers during the period.)
I grew up reading science fiction between about 1968 or so and 1978 (arbitrarily chosen as a terminus when I entered university and "was grown" and my reading patterns changed). So when I was growing up Asimov was basically a science (and pop history, etc.) writer who used to write SF. (The Gods Themselves appeared just before I was in high school, and included a relatively refreshing attempt to imagine genuinely alien aliens, although it was otherwise very Asmovian -- and relatively dull -- in its human parts of the story: see Jo Walton's review of it.) For me, the definitive Asimov stories were from before 1960; and I think that this is still true.
He had been assigned a place for some time as one of the three most important living SF writers, along with Clarke and Heinlein. But it wasn't for the depth of his characterisation (nonexistent), or even the complexity of his plots. And despite what's sometimes said, it wasn't particularly representative of "hard" SF: his two most characteristic innovations, the positronic robots and the discipline of psychohistory, are both handwaves which are, under any close examination, completely implausible. (The positronic robots are doubly implausible, once at a physical level (how do we avoid a matter/antimatter meltdown?) and once at an AI level (how do we encode complicated concepts like the three laws in the first place?).) Instead, both of them provided a broad setting for stories which used plot twists to create surprise endings or plot reversals. The same was true of the time travel in The End of Eternity.
His later turning of his earlier stories into episodes in a broad future history with R. Daneel Olivaw as a linking character was misconceived, although they sold well. The patching-up was clunky and extraneous to the themes and structure of the earlier stories. And he ended up relying heavily on telepathy as a plot device (he had already introduced it in the Foundation series with the Mule, and the Robots stories with "Liar!" (from 1941)), which moves the work firmly away from Science Fiction and towards Fantasy, regardless of the Campbellian grandfathering of psionics into SF.
In addition, the optimism of the post-war America which had permeated the earlier stories was gone. (Foundation and Doc Smith's First Lensman, from this distance, both look more like the 1950s than the future.) If psychohistory had been held out as a good thing (assuming it were possible) in the early stories, the later ones are less sure. The absence of a leisure society with the help of robots was explained away by making the Spacers a "dead end" (to explain (away) the Empire as Asimov had originally shown it).
I can't think of any ex post facto attempt to tie everything together that has really worked -- it was one of the major problems with Heinlein's later books, from The Number of the Beast on, as well. If you start with a plan to connect everything, that's one thing. Patching in an odd work (like the incorporation of Triplanetary after the fact by rewriting it) can work. But grafting differently-conceived works, and, even more, universes, together is an invitation to trouble.
There are problems with Asimov's work which were more-or-less invisible at the time but became more obvious as it aged. It was thoroughly sexist, in a way that blended into the background in the 1950s, but became glaring by the turn of the century; and this never really went away, even in the later books, although he added more realistic women in the later books. (Asimov's personal sexism / harassment patterns play into this.) What felt like purely neutral, invisible, prose at the time has also (inevitably) taken on a patina of age.
His influence has long been integrated into the field. It's hard to remember now, but the idea of robots was less than 20 years old when he wrote his first positronic robot story (1939 for "Robbie" -- Capek's R.U.R. dates from 1920) and the model of non-threatening robots he introduced has long been drawn on in other works, some closer (there are relatively many authorized stories in the "early" robots universe by other authors) and some more removed from his original model. And it's possible to argue that the many all-human space kingdoms / empires of later space opera draw some of their inspiration from the background to the Foundation books. Psychohistory is less of an influence, aside from works such as Psychohistorical Crisis which are direct homages, although one can see Dickson's William of Ceta as someone making a failed attempt to use a similar discipline (critiqued towards the end of Dorsai! by Donal Graeme).
I suspect that Asimov's works have "aged" (in the sense of becoming more alien) about as much as they're ever going to -- what survives now will continue to be read, more or less as the best of Verne's novels do -- at least by those interested in the roots of SF. This is assisted by the fact that much of his better work was short stories, which show off his plot twist model far better than longer works (even the early "novels" in the Foundation series are really collections of novellas). (One of the problems with his later work was that he took to writing longer novels which showcased his plotting techniques less effectively; they're loosely episodic in structure some feel a bit as though they are held together by duct tape.)