At the Very Root of the Golden Age (Editorial, NYRSF 298)

I’m reworking here for reasons I’ll explain further down a short essay I posted on my (now sadly too-fallow) Livejournal a few years ago.

A few years back, on the Locus Roundtable <www.locusmag.com/Roundtable/2009/06/best-of-sturgeon.html>, Graham Sleight posted a proposed table of contents for a collection of the best Theodore Sturgeon stories. Graham suggested that his collection could be called The Great Emo Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, and joked:

A friend of mine keeps saying that one day he’s going to compile a book called The Great Emo Stories of Isaac Asimov—containing the one percent of Asimov stories where he puts gadgets and ideas to the back of his mind and talks about emotions instead.

Of course, that friend was (is) me.

Here are the stories that I would without hesitation put in such a collection:

• “Liar” (1941)
• “The Fun They Had” (1951)
• “Satisfaction Guaranteed” (1951)
• “It’s Such a Beautiful Day” (1954)
• “Dreaming Is a Private Thing” (1955)
• “The Dead Past” (1956)
• “The Ugly Little Boy” (1958)
• “Eyes Do More than See” (1965)
• “The Bicentennial Man” (1976)

More borderline are “Franchise” (1955), which hovers between emotion and gimmick, and the Black Widowers story “Early Sunday Morning” (1973), which skillfully undermines the distant, cozy framework Asimov created for those otherwise highly mannered stories. It’s tempting to include “The Last Question” (1956), because the story itself has such a strong emotional impact, but the story really isn’t about the emotional impact of technological innovations or events on the figures within the story.

The last short piece I’d include, and the least obvious, would be “The Mule” (1945), the novella which became the second half of Foundation and Empire. “The Mule” is noteworthy for its emphasis on chaotic emotion—fear, loss, regret, and inadequacy—in the middle of probably the archetypal science-fiction novel of the triumph of pure reason. Also, of all the Foundation stories it’s the one that most directly confronts the impact on the characters of the knowledge that they are characters, caught in a story written by a long-dead author—by showing what happens to them when the story goes off the rails.

Then I would fill this volume out with The End of Eternity (1955), in the manner of the classic Viking Portable Library volumes, which often included a short novel along with the wide selection of shorter stories to present an author or period.

Although most of the these stories could, fairly, be described as “idea” or “gadget” stories, the focus of each of them is not on the novum itself but on the emotional impact of the novum on its characters. As a time-travel story, or even as anthropology, there’s nothing in “The Ugly Little Boy” that wasn’t in a hundred thousand stories before; and “The Bicentennial Man” adds nothing to the puzzle-generation framework of the Three Laws stories. But the love for humanity in each story overflows them.

And there you’d have it—a collection of Asimov stories, all of them right at the heart of the sf canon, which show the emotional range available even in sf’s relatively early days. If Asimov had never written another word of prose beyond these stories, I think he’d still be remembered as a major figure in the field. His reputation would be very different, but still a major figure. It’s a shame Asimov didn’t discover this strain in himself earlier—only “Liar” and “The Mule” are from the 1940s. It’s tempting to say that John W. Campbell had no room for sentiment. . . .

. . . and that’s the point that made me want to re-present this little exercise. In the June 15, 2013 episode of the wonderful weekly The Coode Street Podcast <www.jonathanstrahan.com.au/wp/2013/06/16/episode-146-live-with-e-lily-yu/>, Jonathan Strahan, Gary Wolfe, and guest E. Lily Yu. In a larger discussion of the changing sense of the canon of the field, Wolfe describes reading Asimov’s stories as “cleverly constructed . . . like working a crossword puzzle . . . enjoyable but kind of flat.” I’m not singling out Gary here; this is a completely typical response to Asimov, and to the writers of his generation (especially Campbell’s stable) overall.

One of my particular intellectual perversities that if I hear someone make a general claim, I immediately start looking for the exceptions. Even in the Golden Age, Campbell didn’t just publish arid “idea stories”; the pages of Astounding were filled with L. Sprague de Camp’s romps, A. E. van Vogt’s hallucinations, Robert Heinlein’s dry humor, L. Ron Hubbard’s sloppy, wild adventures. And he published Asimov.

Isaac Asimov, the cold, cool puzzler of clockwork science fiction, was also the sentimental creator of a lonely Neanderthal boy and the nurse who loved him; of parents so desperate that they will destroy society to see their dead son one last time; of the robot who so loved humans that he died just to become one. And that’s an exception worth remembering.

—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors