(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: "Ouverture 'Jupiter'" by F. Hoffmann (1883) on bright synth)
Asimov background, non-spoiler discussion
Nate:
Good evening and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. This month we are taking a look at the July 1939 issue of Astounding, which is considered by many to be the start of the golden age of science fiction. And we're not just taking a look at the stories in the magazine, we're taking a look at the entire contents of the magazine from start to finish. So if you want to listen to our segment on the first story to appear in the magazine as well as some commentary on the initial editorials and advertisements and stuff like that, you can listen to our first segment on A.E. Van Vogt's "Black Destroyer".
But after the first story closes, we get two little pieces on the next page, which are a teaser for what is going to come in the next couple of issues. I guess we got a progress update on Doc E. E. Smith and his "Gray Lensman" manuscript.
JM:
Yes.
Nate:
Doc E. E. Smith is definitely a celebrity writer of science fiction, at least for the pulp audience at this time. He seems to be pretty much universally loved by everybody. And we haven't covered him yet on the podcast, but he is an author that I would definitely like to cover at some point in the future, perhaps next year.
JM:
I'm really thinking about how we should do that, more of that space opera stuff, because yeah, he is pretty much the progenitor of that. So I think him and Edmond Hamilton and I guess even Jack Williamson, you know, they're all kind of part of that generation. But Smith was kind of the first one, I think. So I think what "Skylark of Space" states back to 1915 or something like that.
Nate:
Yeah. It's pretty old.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
But yeah, it teases a couple other things. Lester Del Ray is the "The Luck of Ignatz", a new author in the form of Frederick Engelhardt, Lee Gregor, I don't know, some other stuff. So that's neat that they do that every month.
Gretchen:
Also, I did check up to see if he delivered on the promises.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Just because he does say that sometimes they don't necessarily come true. And Del Ray's "Luck of Ignatz" is the next cover story. So he did get that, right.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
"Pleasure Trove" by P. Schuyler Millers in the next issue. So is Frederick Engelhardt's "General Swamp, CIC", which is in two parts over the next two issues. And Lee Gregor wrote "Heavy Planet".
As for Smith's story, "Gray Lensman", it's actually the cover story for the October 1939 issue.
Nate:
Yeah. He says he's trying to cut it down to 100,000 words. So they must have serialized it across several issues.
JM:
Oh, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
And if he got it down that far, and I think that's what he mostly did is writing it in serial form anyway.
But yeah, I need that they put the little teasers out for the next month, even if sometimes things happen with publication, like with any industry.
JM:
Things get shuffled around.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
And, you know, as great an editor as Campbell arguably was, I do sometimes feel even in this issue, there's a story that I'm going to talk about eventually that it'll get to where I think that if it had been shuffled around a bit, it might have actually been good. But anyway, more on that when we talk about Amelia Reynolds Long.
Nate:
Sure. Yeah. Then the other little brief thing we get on the end of the page is the Analytical Laboratory, where we get a ranking of the five best stories in the last issue, I believe?.
Gretchen:
The May issue.
Nate:
So two issues.
JM:
The May. Yeah. So I think at this time it was monthly, so I guess, but I guess, you know, you got to give people a little time to read it and then send stuff in the mail and whatnot.
Nate:
So yeah. So here is the ranking of the May issue. Number one is special flight by John Berryman. Number two is an article "Designed for Life" by L. Sprague de Camp. Number three is "The Day is Done" by Lester del Rey. Number four, "Employment" by Lyman R. Lyon. And number five, "Melody and Moons" by Kent Casey.
JM:
The only writer. Well, I've not read this story, but the Lester del Rey, I've read a few of his stories. And of course, we've talked about de Camp before.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
His science articles seem to be quite popular.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
I think he was quite good at this and also talking about history and things like linguistics and stuff like that. There's an article by Willie Ley in this issue that's a response or kind of a response to one of his pieces. So people obviously liked that. And I can see him being good at that actually.
Nate:
Yeah. He's definitely a very well varied writer.
Gretchen:
And I mean, even in the work we read, "Lest Darkness Fall", like there is a lot of detail in it. So you can definitely see how he'd be good at writing nonfiction.
Nate:
Yeah. A lot of historical detail and that kind of analysis. There's some linguistics, but it's definitely not all speculation on fantasy physics or anything like that.
JM:
Right.
Nate:
He definitely has a strong interest in history, archaeology and science and technology studies in general.
JM:
I can see him and Asimov getting on pretty well. And apparently they did somewhat. So it's like they seem like they shared a lot of sort of poly, not polyglot necessarily, but like interests that cross over into many different areas and an ability to kind of make sense of it all and connect it. And I'm not quite so ramshackle holistic way as a Van Vogt.
Nate:
Yeah. And the author that we encounter after this piece is Asimov. And, you know, obviously, if you're listening to this podcast, there's no way you're not familiar with who Isaac Asimov is, as the man has had a massively huge influence on the science fiction genre. "Foundation" is routinely cited as one of the best science fiction novels ever written. His robotic stories and the three laws are maybe the best known robotic stories ever written, which as we've seen on the podcast aren't the first about such ideas, but they certainly played a major role in shaping how the genre took afterwards in the 1950s and onward. And like L. Sprague de Camp, in addition to his science fiction output, he wrote dozens of nonfiction books on a very wide variety of subjects.
This story is not only the first time we're covering Asimov on the podcast, but the first time we're covering any of the so called "big three" science fiction authors on the podcast, which are Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke. And I think it's pretty important to note that Astounding played a very important role in the early stages of all of their careers. Heinlein's debut was in Astounding, which is his debut anywhere, and that is in the next issue after this one, August 1939.
Clarke's first professional sale was also to Astounding, a little bit later, published in the April 1946 issue, though he had a number of earlier stories in fanzines like Amateur Science Stories, which is pretty neat. Asimov is the only one out of three whose first professional sale wasn't to Astounding. And while this one we're going to be talking about tonight, "Trends" is his debut appearance in Astounding. He had a previous sale to Amazing, "Marooned off Vesta" in the March 1939 issue. And a story that was printed earlier but sold later than this one, "The Weapon too Dreadful to Use" in the May 1939 issue.
Asimov had a tremendous respect for Astounding and Campbell and considered it the best magazine in the science fiction field and felt like magazines like Amazing were second tier. And that Astounding was the magazine that he really wanted to break into, which he was quite persistent at doing so. So he was only 19 when the story was published in the July 1939 issue. And as it was the second story he sold, it's obviously quite early in an extremely lengthy career, which is really so massive that it's impossible to discuss it in any kind of concise form. So I think we'll save some aspects of his later career for when we cover those later stories as I think we'll be revisiting his later stories. I don't know how much we want to cover his earlier stuff, "Marooned off Vesta" or "The Weapon too Dreadful to Use," but we'll just bring us up to this point in his life of July 1939.
So as part of Asimov's nonfiction, he also wrote a lot about himself, having technically two autobiographies, but the first was published in two volumes. The first, "In Memory Yet Green", published in 1979 covers from his birth in 1920 to 1954. And the second volume "In Joy Still Felt" published in 1980 covers from 1954 to 1978. These are absolutely massive books when combined with one another, they're about 650,000 words, and they just go into an incredible, incredible amount of detail about his life.
JM:
So I just want to add, I haven't read these autobiographies, however, I have read a lot of Asimov. It's impossible for me not to talk about this at least a little bit this episode. So when I was really getting into science fiction stuff as a kid, the first writer that I really discovered and latched out to was Isaac Asimov. And I read probably between the ages of 9 and 13, pretty much everything I could get my hands on by him, which was a lot.
He wrote a lot of stuff, and yeah, I mean, I had trouble getting access to all the books that I wanted, but I was able to get a good amount of his stuff. And even nonfiction stuff, which I read a little bit more of later, for example, his two guides to Shakespeare are excellent. Very, very detailed, very knowledgeable, explaining every scene, explaining details of language, historical context, they're so good. Like, if you, you know, our high school student, sort of struggling especially to get into Shakespeare, maybe, they would be way more beneficial than something like Cliff Notes, I think. I don't know if that's still a thing, but it was when I was in school.
Nate:
Oh, it definitely is, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah.
JM:
Yeah, so, but yeah, and of course, lots of science books. He was really good at popular science, but the science fiction stories were mostly what I was into, and especially the short stories. I think Asimov is a writer that I guess many people find fault with now because, like, his characters are not that detailed and stuff like that, and they're always, I don't know, sometimes, I guess, the stories can be a little bit like the longer ones, like even the first Foundation book at times, I think it gets a little bit too slow at talking, and like, not a lot seems to be happening, except guys talking at each other. But I think in the short story form, he's just so good, and a lot of his stories are problems that need to be solved. And the fun of the story is seeing how the people in the story do or don't solve the problem and thinking about how you might solve the problem with them.
So I really like that. And, you know, he wrote a lot of mystery stories too, and you can tell that that's something he was into, and he was into the idea of solving a problem. And that's what that's, I think, one of the first things that I, right away, liked about him and that I always thought that I was learning something when I was reading an Asimov story too.
Nate:
Right. Yeah. Yeah, I got into him or introduced to him pretty young as well. I had a collection of his robot stories. I didn't really read them that much. Like, I must have read them once when I was a kid, but I never really revisited them and certainly haven't since. I've also read the "Foundation" novels, the first one in high school and the second two later on, I didn't do any of the later ones. And yeah, I mean, I could definitely see the influence. I would certainly like to revisit the robotic stuff probably on the podcast, the "Foundation" stuff I'm a little mixed on, but it's obviously it has its place.
JM:
Yeah, I get that. Honestly, it's not even the robot stuff that I remember most from the short stories because he literally has hundreds and some of them are very humorous. Some of them are more of a mystery setup, whereas, yeah, it's just quite diverse in its way and the writing is simple enough that a pretty young person can understand it, but you never feel like you're being talked down to or that he doesn't know what he's doing when he's writing something, which is nice.
Nate:
Yeah, and while his autobiographies, the first set anyway are massive, I mean, it's like 1500 pages combined, just because he is a good writer and he has a very inviting tone. It reads very well and Asimov himself even says that, you know, nothing really happens in his autobiographies because despite the fact that he's a successful science fiction writer and very well acclaimed and all that he has led a rather uneventful and kind of boring life, which I thought was amusing. And yeah, I can really recommend the long first two volumes of the autobiography.
There is a later one called "I. Asimov: a Memoir", which was published posthumously in 1994 that covers his entire life in one volume that's in much more concise form. And it's the one that won the Hugo and probably more accessible for a casual reader. But again, if you're an Isaac Asimov fan, if you just like reading his writing, the first two earlier autobiographies from the late 70s, early 80s are a really fun read.
And, you know, we obviously don't have nearly enough time to get into all of it here, I just want to provide a brief sketch of his life, which is pretty much drawn mostly from the "In Memory Yet Green" up to the story that we're going to be looking at tonight, which is "Trends".
JM:
So before you do that, I just cut in briefly and say, even though I haven't read the autobiographies, Asimov is one of the most chatty individuals you'll ever come across in writing. He wrote so much about himself to the point where people think that he's very pompous about himself. But I don't know, he doesn't come across that way in the writing, at least he comes across more self deprecating like you just pointed out.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
And every book he ever wrote has an introduction by him. If it's short stories, it has several paragraphs before and after about each story where he's talking about it. And if he's writing an anthology of other people's work, he'll talk about the other people's work, but also how it relates to him and his experience. I've never seen anybody go that far before when I came across him doing that. You know what? I kind of like it because it gives me a real sense of him, right? It's not unpleasant. Sometimes when reading that de Camp autobiography, I'm like, yeah, I can see why Nevala-Lee says that some of the other writers from Batman actually found him a little bit annoying. But I don't get that sense from Isaac Asimov.
That said, he does have a kind of infamous skeleton in the closet with his groping at conventions, activities and something that didn't come out that much till, I guess, more recently. But it seemed like it was acknowledged by a lot of people at cons at the time.
Nate:
Yeah. And it's, I guess, interesting the way how society changes because while I'm sure the women that he sexually assaulted, you know, basically were not OK with it, it's almost like society was, you know, like he was doing it out in the open like, you know, this is like a wacky funny thing or whatever. And that was just like the accepted culture. And, you know, nobody kind of batted an eye. I mean, I'm sure the women were obviously upset that it happened to. But it's not like anybody took him aside and say, hey, you know, knock it off, you know, you can't be doing this. Whereas today, you know, you might face like, you know, the police would get called or...
JM:
I think Harlan Ellison might have.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
But apparently that was something that he commented on. So yeah, he doesn't seem like somebody who would hold back if he had comments about it. Wanted to take somebody to task for something.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't like the way he wrote women in "Foundation". And that was like long before I knew about that. And kind of putting the two and two together it makes sense. And sometimes you get a little more of a glimpse of a person than you want to through their writing and their actions combined. But yeah.
JM:
So Gretchen, did you have any experience with him before now?
Gretchen:
I actually have not. It's a bit embarrassing, but out of the main three sci-fi writers we've mentioned, the only one I've actually read from before is Heinlein, just "Stranger and Strange Land." So this is a, yeah, this is my first Asimov and I enjoyed this story. I'll say that right now. I thought it was, I thought it was a good story.
Nate:
Yeah, no, this is a good one. And it may not be what most people associate Asimov with, but it's cool when it comes together in really neat ways and then we'll get into more specifics of it in a little bit.
But I just want to briefly run through his life up until the point when he was 19 and started selling stories to science fiction magazines.
So according to his father, Judah Asimov, Isaac was descended from a long line of Jewish scholars born in Petrovichi, a tiny village in the Smolensk region of modern day Russia, which was then the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Sometime around January 2nd of 1920, the exact date is not known, but that's always been the day that he's celebrated his birthday. And Asimov says that he finds it odd that so many great scholars came from the tiny village of Petrovichi, which has a modern day population of something like 200 people. But despite the fact that his father was primarily a dealer in grain, he was also fluent in Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew before he emigrated to the United States.
The Asimovs leaving Russia was very undramatic, considering other people's experiences fleeing the chaos of the Russian Revolution or the pogroms. The Asimovs simply came to the United States because a relative invited them to come to Brooklyn, which they thought was too good of a business opportunity to pass up. Another one might not come again, and apparently the most difficult part of getting to the United States was the bureaucracy involved with the necessary paperwork and leaving what was then the RSFSR.
Asimov notes that this was a very fortunate circumstance for him, as his wartime experience would have been much, much different had he grown up in the Soviet Union instead of the United States. But, grew up in Brooklyn, he did. The Asimovs arrived in the United States in 1923, along with his younger sister, Marcia. They spoke Yiddish at home, and despite having cultural ties to Russia, they did not speak Russian in the home, and as such, Isaac picked up no Russian, and never learned it in the course of his life.
His father initially had a frustrating time integrating into society, not knowing any English, but eventually became established within the Jewish Brooklyn community and operated a local candy store for years, which provided a stable household throughout the Great Depression. Asimov fell in love with books at an early age, very much sparked by an interest in Greek mythology, which led him into rereading both the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" numerous times, even making up his own adventures for Achilles after the events of the "Iliad", although none of his versions included Achilles' dying.
Asimov read a lot of 19th-century fiction like Dumas, Dickens, Edith Nesbit, and Louisa May Scott, but he says he never got into the serious 20th-century literature and never read any Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, or Kafka, but he loved mysteries like Agatha Christie and PG Wodehouse, and was also, of course, attracted to the pulps of his day, in particular, the science fiction pulp magazines.
While he never saw a copy of Amazing #1 as it debuted on the newsstand, it was some of those early issues of Amazing that first attracted his attention. The covers, of course, being very lurid and strange and making a young child want to know more about the contents of the stories, and his father disapproved of him reading such magazines, though he, in secret, had an affinity for "The Shadow".
JM:
So, yeah, just imagining the conversations Isaac and his father had over this is really funny. I guess it may have mostly the way Isaac Asimov writes about it, but it's just, yeah.
Nate:
But he had a real breakthrough with his father in 1929, when Gernsback came out with Science Wonder Stories. After all, this magazine had the word "science" in the title, so, of course, it should be okay to read it.
JM:
It's useful!
Nate:
Right, yeah.
Gretchen:
Practical.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
So, yeah, he was able to read some of these science fiction pulps, and the library was a really good place to find these publications as a kid who couldn't get any money to buy them. As the science fiction magazine field was rapidly expanding, and there wasn't just issues of Amazing, there were like two or three other pulps that were popping up, and that would soon to become dozens and dozens by the end of the 1940s.
So, he would get these copies of the science fiction pulps from the library, and he would start telling the stories with some personal embellishments to his friends at school. Clifford Simak's "World of the Red Sun" from Wonder Stories was one that he particularly liked. And after figuring out rather quickly that manually copying books by hand in order to have copies of them from the library was not practical, he got the idea of writing his own.
He estimates that his first attempts at writing fiction were around Fall of 1931, which was an intended serial called "The Greenville Chums" at College, that I guess was like influenced by like Tom Swift or Hardy Boys type adventures. He got the name from a book called The Darewell Chums at College, which was one of the many Darewell Chums adventures. The Greenville Chums, like pretty much all of his work from the early stage is unfortunately lost, and in high school he later wrote pieces for the Boys High Recorder, which was the school newsletter of the Boys High School where he attended. And the building is still there, and it's still in operation as a school at 1700 Fulton Street in Brooklyn, where he graduated from at the age of 15.
It was around this time that he wrote in his first letter to Astounding, which got published in the February 1935 issue. Interesting, the cover of this issue is Nat Schachner's "The Ultimate Metal", who we'll be hearing about in a little bit. Asimov himself would cite Schachner as an influence, stating in his "Before the Golden Age" anthology, "it was when I came to write The Foundation Trilogy, there were times when the voice of Schachner sounded in my ear."
But in February 1935, in astounding, he says in a letter to the magazine,
"Dear Editor :
I have put off writing this letter for a long time, hut I have at last decided that whether i will or no, my humble contribution goes to yon (and also to the wastebasket, I fear).
1 — Astounding Stories as a whole is the best magazine on the market, and people who claim otherwise show lack of taste.
2 — Artistically, the covers are fine, but how about getting some that pertain more directly to the stories? Usually, I have quite a task discovering from Just what portion of a story a cover was taken.
3 — I have nothing to say about the edges or size because I buy the magazine for what’s in it and nothing else.
4 — Brass Tacks is a really enjoyable department. I wonder, though, if it would be a practical idea to have an editor’s note under each letter, commenting on its contents.
5 — Serials are all right when not dealt out too freely.
6 — I find that your stories tend to harp rather too much on hackneyed themes such as earth-demolishing wars once in a while. Fortunately, this does not occur too often.
7 — Interplanetary stories are getting painfully rare, and I do wish that some would appear in the very near future.
8 — How about having an occasional feature magazine (say, once a year) devoted to only one type of story, e.g., an Issue composed solely of Interplanetary stories?
9 — I am in favor of Astounding Stories Quarterly, Astounding Stories coming out twice a month, and in fact, any device whereby I may get our "mag" more times a year. — Isaac Asimov. 1312 Decatur St., Brooklyn, N.Y."
JM:
That's quite a lot of stuff. Worthy suggestions.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely. And it was this letter that got him inducted into a group of "first fans". While Asimov himself says he wasn't really active in talking to other fans through penpal correspondence or anything this early on, the fact that he did write a letter into Astounding, I guess, qualifies him. So yeah, age of 15, very interested in Astounding Stories, and clearly at this time thinks it's the best thing around.
But after high school, he was rejected from Columbia and eventually went to Seth Low Junior College, where he says that in his undergraduate zoology class, they made them trap homeless cats, kill them, then dissect them. So hopefully the lab work in zoology classes have changed since then. Because that was very traumatic on Asimov, and he said it's one of the things that he regrets most in his life, and it just makes you wonder, like, why they would do it that way, but I guess things were a bit different in the 1930s.
But it was around this time that he gets a typewriter, and he writes around 30,000 words of an unfinished fantasy novel afterwards attempting his first piece of science fiction in 1936. Unfortunately, Asimov doesn't give us a title of this unfinished work, and he says that the manuscript survived until at least 1940, but has long been lost. On this piece, he says that there was, "a great deal of talk about the fifth dimension at the start, and that later on there was some catastrophe that destroyed the photosynthesis, though not on Earth, I think. I remember one sentence and one sentence only. It was, 'whole forests stood sere brown in midsummer.' Why I remember that, I don't know, but that is the earliest existing Asimovian science fiction sentence."
JM:
Wow.
Nate:
Eventually his science fiction collection would grow so large that he would have to make a custom indexing system to find out which stories by which authors were in which magazines. He cites E. E. Smith's "Galactic Patrol" as a particular favorite from around this time, and it didn't take much longer for him to decide to submit a story himself to one of these magazines.
So on May 29 of 1937, Asimov begins to write "Cosmic Corkscrew", which is also now lost. On the story, he says, "in it I viewed time as a helix. That is something like a bedspring. Someone could cut across from one turn directly to the next, thus moving into the future by some exact interval, but being incapable of traveling one day less into the future. I didn't know the term at the time, but what I had done was to quantize time travel. As far as I knew that the notion of helical time was original with me, it is difficult for me to remember what particularly inspired the story. I think it began with my discovery in the books I read of the neutrino. The existence of the neutrino had been postulated five years earlier and had not yet been detected. Indeed, at the time, it was thought that it might never be detected."
So he was a big fan of the direction that Campbell was taking the magazine, and this is when he started to write in more letters to the magazine. In May of 1938, his subscription didn't come for two weeks, and fearing that the publication had been late for two weeks in a row, on May 17th, he took the subway over to Manhattan to go to the Street and Smith offices.
JM:
Yeah, this is a cute story. He's so concerned that he's not getting his magazine. I think I'll just drop in at the office.
Nate:
Yeah, that's exactly what he did. The building at 79 7th Avenue, and fortunately for him, the magazine had just shifted his publication schedule and there was nothing wrong with the magazine or the operation. So don't worry, it's not going out of business. But this trip over the river gave Asimov the inspiration to do something else.
So "Cosmic Corkscrew" was still kicking around in an unfinished state, and he decided to finish it off, which he did on June 19th. And after deliberating whether or not to mail it into the magazine, he decided to go back in person to the Street and Smith offices to deliver it to Campbell. And also to pester the staff even more about why the issues have been late in the last couple months, which I'm sure they weren't too appreciative of.
But to his surprise, Campbell actually admitted him to his office and decided to see him. And Campbell had already been familiar with Asimov's name from the letters that he had sent in, something that definitely had worked in his favor. He wrote in quite a bit during the period of 1938. And the two met for a while, talked about Astounding, the writing process, and Campbell even let him in on the Don Stuart secret. Campbell showed Asimov some future planned issues of astounding, which Asimov just thought was the coolest thing ever. And Campbell related his own experiences to Asimov as a young author trying to submit manuscripts to, in his case, it was Amazing. And he promised to read Asimov's manuscript and send him a letter as soon as possible, either accepting it or rejecting it. And in the case of a rejection, it would come with extensive notes on how to make it better.
So Campbell is a man of his word, and he lived up to his promise. He read it that very night, and of course rejected it. And he promptly sent out a letter that Asimov received two days later. And this was far from a discouragement, and it really got his inspiration going, and caused him to write more and more stories very quickly to fit into what Campbell wanted in terms of tone, content, length, etc. And he turns out his second story, "Stowaway" in 18 days.
JM:
It's so cool because a lot can be said about Campbell and even his own self-admitted approach to being an editor where he's thinking a bit more like a laboratory. It may not seem great, but then all these authors are like, yeah, he didn't just reject my story. He sent me a whole bunch of notes explaining how I could possibly try again and make something better. And although sometimes it does seem like this is what John Campbell wants, it does also seem like he was giving really good advice a lot of the time.
Nate:
And he was willing to work with authors that he saw potential in. I mean, obviously I'm sure he got no shortage of submissions that were just like total unworkable crap and nonsense. And it's too bad that none of that stuff survives because it would kind of be funny to read some of that.
JM:
Leigh Brackett submitted her first stories to Astounding, but she actually left and she said that Campbell, who was very happy to accept her, I think it was some of her first efforts, she said he rejected one of her stories rather viciously and so she moved on to other stuff. I think that was probably around the time she wrote "No Man's Land" for Amazing, probably.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, he definitely did not play favorites. And even authors whose work he liked and accepted, if he received a story that wasn't up to his personal standards, he would reject it even from an established author. And Asimov started to get in contact with other science fiction authors at this time due to his letters appearing in the Astounding column. And an R.R. Winterbotham told Asimov that it took him 43 different stories before he got accepted into a magazine, and don't be scared off by rejections, you're going to get them all the time, especially as a young author, and that it's better not to dwell over individual stories and just keep revising them and keep revising them, but rather jump on to different ideas, which is a philosophy that Asimov personally took to heart. As for the rest of his career, he says that he really only did two revisions for the vast majority of stuff that he wrote.
Like "Cosmic Corkscrew", Asimov also hand-delivered "Stowaway" in person to Campbell, where the two had another lengthy chat. And like the first story he submitted, "Stowaway" was also rejected, but in a way that Asimov describes "as the nicest rejection you could possibly imagine. Indeed, the next best thing to an acceptance."
He really felt that Campbell was a great mentor and Campbell definitely saw something in Asimov's character, even if he felt that his early stories were not good. He felt that Asimov was somebody who was willing to listen to improve and take the craft of writing seriously and was obviously very, very passionate about it if he's coming in person with his manuscripts and pestering the Astounding staff and all that stuff.
So "Stowaway" got shipped around to a few other mags, namely "Thrilling Wonder Stories" and "Amazing". And while it got rejected from these, he turns around his third story, "Marooned off Vesta" even faster, and completes "This Irrational Planet" and "Ring Around the Sun" around the same month. He doesn't want to bother Campbell too much, so he sends him off by mail, not only to Astounding, but also to Thrilling Wonder and Amazing, and turns out more stories.
Campbell, however, rejects five in total, and this starts to discourage Asimov a little bit, but with the monthly meetings he has with Campbell, talking about writing, science fiction, and all that stuff, just keeps him motivated and keeps him going.
So it's around this time he starts to get involved with the Futurians, and he got to hang around with Donald Wolheim and Frederik Pohl, and we talk all about all those people in great detail in our last episode, but he never did hear back from Amazing on "Marooned off Vesta". So in October he asked them for a status report, you know, what happened to my story, and his surprise and his family's delight, he receives a letter of acceptance from Raymond Palmer, where he was paid $64 for "Marooned off Vesta" that would appear in the March 1939 issue of Amazing, and framed the acceptance letter as his first symbol of success in a very obviously long career. Jack Williamson even sent him a nice congratulatory letter after it appeared in print telling him, "'Marooned off Vesta' is a nice yarn, welcome to the ranks."
JM:
Nice, I do want to return to Jack Williamson one day.
Nate:
Yeah, I think that would be fun, yeah. But at this point in time, even though the story that we covered by him wasn't too too far back, you know, only maybe ten years, he was very much the veteran writer at this time, the guy that had been around the scene for a while and was looked up and respected to by this younger crowd of authors like Van Vogt and Asimov. So, you know, it's cool that he acted as a mentor figure to the newer crowd and wasn't just like a jerk to newer writers. Despite the fact that he got this one acceptance in Amazing, he doesn't have much luck with a lot of his other stories and receives a flurry of rejections.
But in January of 1939, Campbell doesn't send him a rejection or an acceptance for his story "Ad Astra", but rather calls him into his office to personally discuss it, and after this meeting he asks him to substantially rewrite it. The rewritten version became "Trends", and this one is actually accepted and sold to Astounding, which becomes his second sale. And over the next couple of weeks, he sells "Ring Around the Sun" to a magazine called Science Fiction, which was a new publication by Hornig that would eventually be called Future Fiction. And a few days after that, he sells "The Weapon Too Dreadful To use", to Amazing. "Stowaway" eventually gets accepted and sold to Astonishing Stories that appeared in the April 1940 issue. "Cosmic Corkscrew" and "This Irrational Planet" were never sold anywhere and are unfortunately lost.
Since Amazing had a faster turnaround time of publishing, "The Weapon too Dreadful" to use appeared in print first in the May 1939 issue, and "Trends" here appears in the July issue of Astounding.
The title change to "Trends" came from Campbell, thinking that it was a little more readable, and even suggested that Asimov use a more Anglo sounding pseudonym which Asimov was firmly against.
JM:
Yeah, he never bowed to that one, that's for sure.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
I am Isaac Asimov and you're gonna know it.
Nate:
Yeah. And Campbell never raised the point again, and this would go on to be the first of many stories that he would write for the magazine, and the two would go on to have a lifelong friendship. Asimov always thought of him, though, as Mr. Campbell rather than John, and described him as, "we never agreed on anything, yet although he stood somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun in politics he was in person as kind, generous, and decent a human being as I have ever met."
One quote I want to bring up before we get into the actual story itself is Asimov, looking back and describing the science fiction landscape around this time in 1939, and he says, "as I look back on those days of the late 1930s, it's clear to me now that science fiction was approaching a fork in the line of its progress. Science fiction pulp, which I had been reading with such love and avidity, was declining, and a new generation of writers was arising, writers who had some feeling for science. Amazing was still slanted towards mad professors with beautiful daughters, towards malevolent monsters and hectic action, and it would even continue to have some commercial success with it. Campbell, however, was pushing for quieter, more thoughtful stories in which the science was realistic, and which scientists, inventors, and engineers talked and acted like recognizable human beings. That was the direction of progress, and it was the one in which I tended of my own accord to move. Since that was also the direction in which Campbell drew me, my progress was rapid."
So yeah, "Trends", I like this one. Gretchen, you said that you like this one too. So yeah, how do we feel about this in general?
JM:
It definitely did feel ahead of its time in a lot of ways because it's hard to imagine this, even concept being thought of in the time where rocketry was really just bursting out, and it's like there haven't really been any, I mean, there haven't been any space missions.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
Yeah, and so it's just really interesting to see this. Nate, you mentioned that there was a similarity to a more modern work that you noticed right away, right?
Nate:
Yeah, I'd never read the book, Carl Sagan's "Contact", but I saw the movie a long time ago, and there's definitely some parallels between that and the film. I don't know if the same plot line comes up in the book.
JM:
Yeah, I haven't read the book either, but I did see the film too, and I heard that the two are not that different, but I'm not sure really.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I've also only seen the film, I haven't read the book.
Nate:
I think that's a common theme with it. Apparently, I don't know, I heard some people say that Sagan is great as a popular science person, and he really is a fantastic educator the way he phrases things and his whole vibe, but a person told me that his prose as a science fiction author just really isn't that captivating or thrilling, which I could kind of see. But again, I haven't read the book, so I can't personally say.
JM:
Yeah, obviously, I've read a lot of Asimov short stories, and often it's just not even the robot stories or the "Foundation" stories, but just all the things that came up within both contemporary and futuristic settings and the problems that he presents in his stories. And I do think, in a way, this feels, again, like a problem-solving story.
Nate:
In a sense, yeah.
JM:
Yeah, there's an issue that the characters need to fix or solve. I don't know, a big obstacle they have to get around in order to achieve the thing that they want. And it's kind of dystopian, especially if you're a scientist.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah.
JM:
But it's kind of weird because in the end he's like, well, it's not that bad, the pendulum will swing back the other way one day. And it's true, but I guess the story could have been a lot darker, showing the real downsides of the religious persecution and stuff like that. But there's no lynchings or burnings or anything like that that are obviously described in the story, although it's hinted stuff does get pretty extreme at some point. It does kind of also have that, hey, we're a persecuted minority of scientists, people don't understand us, and we're under threat from a foolish, superstitious majority kind of thing. But I don't know, he makes it endearing. You feel the emotional plight of the man who just wants to discover and thinks that that's worthy of it for its own sake, basically.
So yeah, I enjoyed it too. I mean, I don't know, it's cool because I think in a lot of ways reading this just kind of made me remember how great it was to read Asimov short stories and it made me want to go read more of them again.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
So I think that that kind of was part of reading this for me.
Gretchen:
I mean, someone who hasn't, as I mentioned, hasn't read really any other Asimov, I've always planned to read his work given how influential he's been. But after reading the story, I'm definitely looking forward to reading more of his stories and not more of his work.
JM:
Yeah, I would definitely recommend a lot of the short story collections. Just read those. I mean, he does have a few good novels, but as I've gotten older, it's been the short stories that I really remember being really excited by most. And I don't know if that's a popular conception now or not. I mean, I know "Foundation" just became a TV series and stuff. And I do really like "Foundation and Empire", especially. And then the book "The End of Eternity" is really good. It's like a standalone book about an agency that controls travel and time kind of subject for another podcast episode, maybe, but just because it is a standalone, it would actually be a good one to read. "The Caves of Steel" is a cool detective story set in New York involving robots and the future New York City, which is like completely underground. Nobody ever, ever tastes the fresh air. And then it's cool. It's like it's got that detective fiction feeling to it. And like as I said before, he was into writing mysteries as well. So, and this is the big story about a cop who has to work with a robot partner. And to him, that's really, really weird, right? He has all these anti-robot prejudices. So, but it's good. It's fun. It's a really good time.
Nate:
Yeah, it's interesting the way the, I guess, science fiction publishing landscape changes over time. As short stories in the magazine format were definitely, definitely the dominant landscape throughout the 20s, 30s and probably the 40s. But now we think of it as, you know, being a novel, you know, you read a book and the book is a novel. And, you know, that's, that's how most people are orienting their stories and how publishers are marketing it to readers. But I think it's interesting that a lot of the, you know, the big three, the greats of science fiction, they really get their start in the pulp magazines doing short stories and novels like "Foundation" or "Voyage of the Space Beagle" are just kind of fix up versions of the short stories put together in book form. When they weren't initially published that way. I mean, that was kind of one of the complaints that I had when I first read "Foundation". I was like, wow, this is like so disjointed and all over the place. But, you know, now when I look back at doing the podcast and, you know, realizing, okay, well, these were all published as different short stories in a magazine. Yeah, that makes total sense now. A couple of decades later, the magazine's prominence in the publishing landscape would change a lot more and people would be writing more standalone novels. I was trying to look for what science fiction novels from the 20s and 30s are recognized as classics and all that. And there's really not that many, especially when compared to the amount...
JM:
A lot of them are British though.
Nate:
British. Yeah, right. A lot of old Stapleton. Yeah.
JM:
Aldiss talks about this a lot and he kind of says that it's because when, even though science fiction itself was not necessarily lauded or considered high art by British publishing companies. When they did publish an author's work that was science fiction, they just did it and it was treated as like just a normal book. Like it had a chance to be a literary classic almost in a way that didn't happen in the United States. Like H.G. Wells was highly respected for his science fiction work and so was Olaf Stapleton.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah.
JM:
And Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, right? Like, well, I guess Orwell was a bit later.
Nate:
And well, this one definitely is not as literary as those people. It's definitely well written and I think it not only propels a plot along very nicely, but it involves some interesting concepts that have probably come up before in science fiction. And definitely will come up again later and that is religions resistance to scientific progress in some form or fashion. I guess we really haven't done too many dystopian novels on the podcast at this point.
JM:
No, not yet. I mean, we have plans, but it's just one of those too big topics that you don't really know when to start properly addressing it, but it's going to be a thing, right?
Nate:
So I mean, surely that comes up here, but it's interesting. The framing of this really isn't like a dystopian story.
JM:
No.
Nate:
We get religion moving through government and society that way, but it's not like it's an overbearing fascist theocracy or something like that, which I think is an interesting approach to it.
JM:
It is an interesting approach. And I think a part of me didn't like it, but also I don't mind it. I don't know. It's hard to explain like it. I kind of appreciate that that he wasn't like getting hysterical about anything. He's probably missing just how shitty it is for some people like who are not scientists even, right? Like he doesn't talk about the other minorities persecuted by extreme religious fundamentalism, but I don't know.
Gretchen:
I feel like it's a little truer to how a person would perceive it happening. Like I feel like there are times when, I mean, obviously depends on the story, but sometimes there isn't that overbearance in dystopian stories that it's usually granted, obviously. But there's something interesting to seeing it playing out as though it's something that's a little more grounded or something that maybe it doesn't seem as bad as it's happening to the main character that's perceiving it and experiencing it.
Nate:
It's less of a distant fantasy and something that could easily plausible happen in the future. Asimov was acutely aware of the rise of Nazism in Europe as early as Hitler took power in the early 1930s. So I'm sure he was quite aware of how fast political movements can spread over a short amount of time.
JM:
Yeah, he definitely had a thing for, I guess, noticing anti-intellectual behavior and kind of wanting to combat it. And I think that was one of the reasons why he didn't like the film version of Campbell's "Who Goes There?". Because, you know, he's like, oh yeah, the scientist of course is this crazy person who is just like, yeah, let the evil plant alien in here. We'll treat it like a guest. But I think that's kind of unfair. I think there's, I enjoy that film a lot. I think there's more to it than that. I don't really think it's so, I don't know, like for some reason. Like even when I looked up the film version on some website, like it was on, it was featured on like Conservapedia or one of these like ultra conservative alternatives to Wikipedia or something. And it was like talking about the virtues of the film. I don't really, I don't see that, but I don't have to.
Gretchen:
I remember you mentioning, didn't they call it like the Rolling Stones? Like it was like compared to like the Beatles. And like it was to Star Trek what the Rolling Stones were to the Beatles. That's what it was.
JM:
The Rolling Stones were the more badass.
Gretchen:
Yeah, the more conservative version, I guess, the Rolling Stones.
JM:
That's so funny.
Nate:
Well, they're still playing music actually.
JM:
They've actually been getting into the Rolling Stones more lately. I used to not like them actually now and now and like, I kind of been enjoying them more, which is fun. But that's where the alternative timeline, Chrononauts musical podcast, which you may have had a glimpse into last month, but yeah.
Why don't you tell us about what happens? I have actually said a lot of what I wanted to say about it already.
Nate:
And it's not a very long story, despite the fact that it does bring up these philosophical ideas about religion and science. It does so in a pretty quick and effective way. I didn't really get a sense from his autobiography that Asimov bore really any animosity towards religion or religious people.
JM:
So I don't know how much you read, but it was actually an Asimov essay in the early 90s that kind of, oh, I credit rightly or wrongly to making me realize, yeah, probably an atheist. Maybe he doesn't talk about it too much in the autobiography, but he'd write some very anti-religious essays. And I don't remember the name of the one I read, but I remember it was the most anti-religious thing I'd read up to that point in my life. But instead of being weirded out by that, I was kind of like, yeah, yeah, I think he's right. I don't know. I think my views are a little bit more complicated now, but at the same time, I'm still that person.
Nate:
It wasn't a big part of his childhood. He briefly, very briefly attended Hebrew school, but that didn't really last for longer than a couple of months. And he didn't really pick up the language or anything like that. He just picked up a couple of words. And while his father knew the religion inside and out, he didn't really have that much involvement with the temple outside of a brief period of time after they first moved to the United States. So I guess he just had other things going on in that period of his life. I don't know if, like, looking back on it later, he was a little more disdainful of it or whatever.
JM:
It's funny because Campbell made a comment. He was trying to convince Asimov of some weird, I think probably, dianetic-related thing. And Asimov was like, yeah, I don't know if I believe any of that. And Campbell said, you've got a built-in doubter, Isaac. And Asimov said, thank goodness I do, Mr. Campbell. So I think that was pretty much his attitude toward anything like that. I mean, obviously, that stuff doesn't have the interesting history and fascinating iconography that Christianity or Judaism does. And he was interested in that aspect, I think. He liked history and stuff like that. But the mystical side of it was complete nonsense to him. This is pretty much the impression I get.
(music: low rumbling ambience)
spoiler summary and discussion
Nate:
The narrator, Clifford, who is named after Clifford Simak in tribute, sits down with John Harmon in his office and shows him the latest from the newspapers about his attempts to reach the heavens. And it seems like doing this might invoke the wrath of God, so all attempts must be made to stop him. Security must be heightened, and even in a society of 1973 where society has been ready for space travel.
JM:
Yes, those terrible 70s.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
When religion took over the world.
Nate:
The Rolling Stones, too.
JM:
Or America.
Nate:
The world's scientific yearning has drastically declined, it would seem, though certain scientific institutes still survive. One person there, Shelton, has been attending the 20th century evangelical society that of Otis Eldredge's, which seems to be quite the cause for concern. There's been a rather steep rise in religious backlash, almost extremism, and Eldredge is at the forefront of the movement, who sounds very much like a modern TV evangelical preacher.
Still, Harmon can hold his own, and when the doorbell suddenly rings, it's Howard Winstead, head of the Institute. Winstead wants the trial of the rocket postponed, and reiterates that after the Second World War, society has regressed, and now they're in a second Victorian age, where there are lots of prohibitions on everything. It was science, after all, that brought about the horrors of the Second World War, and is something that should be shunned and avoided. And I think this is a really interesting point that he brings up here, writing this in 1939, which is just like right on the cusp of the war in Europe.
JM:
Yeah, he knew it was coming.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, and he did. And it really was science and technology that brought about the horrors of the Second World War, which are still unprecedented in human history. The Nazis had, they needed a great deal of technological sophistication to accomplish the level of mass murder that they did, both in terms of the Holocaust and the Blitzkrieg invasions with the tanks and all that stuff. The casualties that were in the tens of millions of people during the war were directly enabled and made possible by science and technology. So the fact that he is kind of foreseeing what's going to happen pretty much as it is about to. I think it's incredible, both in terms of his prescience as a writer and someone who has an understanding of social situations and how technology can be used for a negative force, not just for good.
Gretchen:
And crazy that this is, you know, the same issue that was praising the progress of atomic power to follow that opening in this issue and then to have the story right near that.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, they're almost like polar opposites.
JM:
And you know, it is interesting that it seems like not everyone was willing to talk about this stuff, but he was, which is cool.
Nate:
Yeah. And I think that's really something that makes science fiction come alive and really the model of a great science fiction story is that kind of awareness and that kind of understanding of how technology can be used. It's not all neat atomic power that allows us to get all kinds of cool stuff and travel the galaxy and see awesome things. It could also be used to kill millions and millions of people in really horrible ways. And I think people obviously become more conscious of this fact after the horrors of the Second World War, and especially the atomic bomb. But you know, the fact that Asimov is talking about this in 1939 is again a very fascinating snapshot of the world and his idea of thinking.
JM:
Yeah. But he still thinks technology is doing really, really cool stuff here. And he wishes everybody else would too.
Nate:
Yeah, right. Right.
JM:
And that's like the lessons of the war are well learned, but we still need to reach out. We still need to touch the moon and beyond.
Nate:
And that's what they're intending to do here with this rocketry flight that is like the modern Tower of Babel. You know, you can't touch the heavens or you're going to cause a...
JM:
Big cataclysm.
Nate:
Stir up the wrath of God. Yeah, all that stuff that would obviously be worse than the horrors of the Second World War. So this flight is provoking things among the religious extremists. It could push them even further if it goes off into a new dark age. You know, maybe things will revert all the way back to medieval times and there'll be a new inquisition or something like that. Eldredge's League of the Righteous, or the LR, has a membership of 20 million people, which is pretty impressive. I guess spiritualism did spread through 19th century America at a pretty high rate and did attain large membership figures like that. But it's very large for a successful religious movement to come about this quickly. And it even seems like they're able to take control of Congress at some point, so they're able to effectively gain the political system as well.
Harmon is not to be discouraged, however, and even if he likely dies in his flight, someone will pick up his work. And Winstead points out that the mob has no respect for science, so it's best not to bank on that, even if he doesn't get through.
The flight, however, is still on for tomorrow, which is a July 15th, and has drawn a huge crowd of people. Otis Eldredge, of course, is there, calling him the son of Satan and all that, and suddenly there is a huge explosion. Shelton is mortally wounded, but confesses it was he that blew up the fuel line, killing 28 people. And Harmon himself is put in the hospital in Jersey City, and editorials are calling for his head. Mobs of people on the Jersey Shore are fighting with police to try to lynch him, martial laws declared, and the militia eventually quells the mob. Two weeks later, and he's out of the public eye, but an anti-rocketry bill is passed in Congress.
JM:
Isn't this where it turns out that the thing has been sabotaged?
Nate:
Where he blows up the fuel line?
JM:
The guy that was supposedly working for him, or something.
Nate:
Yeah, Shelton.
JM:
Yeah, Shelton, yeah. What a boo-hiss character, man. He's just such a hateful thing to do, and then he just disappears, right? So there's no, like, he doesn't have a character arc or anything, he's just a bastard.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, I guess he does die in the explosion, so that's in his character arc. But yeah, no, I mean, he betrays our hero, and it's just...
JM:
I'm not saying he needs one, but he's just that guy that you really don't like, because he's a toadie, but he's also responsible for all this misery.
Nate:
Yeah, it's terrorism, it's religious terrorism, pretty much no other way to describe it. But yeah, so this puts Harmon in the hospital, the explosion, and Cliff sneaks into the hospital to try to get him out. Harmon has had no contact with the outside world, and has heard nothing of what's happened since the explosion, and Cliff fills him in on all the details. So no legal charges can be filed since he asked the police sergeant to get the crowd out of there, but Eldredge, of course, is still after him.
After six months rest, Harmon is back in good health and spirits, and is going to repeat the experiment, but this time in absolute secrecy. The crowd was obviously a major deterrence last time, and well, we just can't have any of that now. So especially now that all rocketry is punishable by death, so you really don't want the crowd to take notice of what you're doing. And he sends Cliff out to get his liquid assets, and they spend the next five years piecemeal stealthily building the next rocketry craft. The synthetic fuel is the most difficult piece to assemble.
In these five years, conservatism goes on the rise. Eldredge's influence gets lots of anti-science laws passed, and a scientific review and censor board is set up. The Supreme Court sides with all of this by one vote, saying "it was four to five for constitutionality, science strangled by the vote of one man." So even today we get some parallels of what's happening with our modern day Supreme Court, which is also kind of a little unfortunate in some ways.
But Eldredge himself dies in 1976, never fully recovering from the blast, but by 1978, all independent research had been forbidden. After some musings on how society goes back and forth, the Enlightenment after all turned into the Victorian era, the 20s and 30s have now turned into these regressive 70s. The New Prometheus is completed and ready for launch. And the launch was indeed a success. Harmon goes around the moon and on re-entry is promptly arrested.
He reveals his true identity and shows the drawings and photographs of the dark side of the moon, and this all snaps the world out of this phase of conservatism. This anti-Victorianism, anti-religious extremism movement is now on the rise.
JM:
Yeah, all it takes is one really good picture.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
And it's pretty amazing. I wish somebody now like, you know, somebody would be posting all over the internet being like, yeah, it was obviously faked. Here's why. We never really landed on the moon.
Nate:
Yeah, well, who knows. But yeah, that's how the story ends. We get the line "He grinned at me and nodded. Well-cliff, he whispered. The pendulum swung back."
So yeah, I like this one a fair amount. Asimov himself was a little down on his early work saying that these lesser stories, especially the ones he sold to Amazing, are not among his best work. But I think Campbell had a much stricter sense of editorial policy and really brought out the best elements of what Asimov was capable of as a writer at this time.
JM:
Yeah, I guess going back to what I was saying earlier about how I do and don't like that he didn't go, I don't know, he didn't go as dark as he could maybe or something. But again, this is a problem story. So it's like his focus is, this is a short story too. It's not even, what is it, 2,000 words? Maybe not even, I don't know, it's pretty short, right?
Nate:
I think it's more in the 5,000 word range.
JM:
Okay, yeah, probably more like that. Yeah, so its focus is very narrow. Its focus is on this particular problem that we have to solve, right? The dystopia is just a background. I mean, now, yeah, you can make a whole novel out of something like this and probably do pretty good and make the dystopia really dark and convincing and everything like that. But that's not really what he was going for here. And I think, again, that that's part of the power of a short story, being able to focus so specifically on a thing. And here, it's the problem of how we get into space when society is anti-intellectual and against the whole idea of doing this. How do we make this synthetic fuel? Like, it's impossible, right?
But no, we have a way to solve the problem. We have intelligent brains, bright people here that can... And there's a faith in humanity too, in that, yeah, it doesn't really take that much to swing the pendulum back the other way. Which, I don't know, it's easy to feel cynical about that, but it's kind of also admirable that somebody thinks that way, right? Like, you like that kind of person. You want that kind of person around because, you know, they have a positive outlook. And I guess that's kind of what this feels like almost.
Gretchen:
Yeah, very optimistic.
Nate:
And it is, in some ways, refreshing to have optimism in a story that does cover some of these themes that could be potentially heavy. You know, religious extremism, the horrors of war brought on by technology. To maintain a optimistic attitude about its potential for use for good in the future, triumphing over people who want to use it for evil and people who want to do away with it altogether.
JM:
So two years after this story, Asimov would publish one of his most lauded stories. And it's even called by some people the best science fiction short story of all time. I don't know if... I hesitate to make claims like that. Like, I don't really know what constitutes "best" necessarily. Like, it depends on even your mood and how you're feeling at any one time, let alone how many millions of people in the world read science fiction and what they might look for.
But "Nightfall" is considered by some to be one of the best science fiction short stories of all time. And it is another story about superstition and the attempt to combat it with rationality. And it is set on an alien planet where humanoid-seeming creatures live. And they live on a planet with multiple suns where it's never dark except for this one time every so many thousand years or whatever. It's only a legend now because it's been so long, but it's pretty much just figured that every time this happens, people see the stars for the first time and the only time and they pretty much lose their mind. And like, the world plunges into a dark age because the society is not equipped to handle it.
And they're still kind of like, the way it's written, the society is slightly, I don't know, what their technological level would be. But it's not like 1940s America, you know what I mean? It's like, it's probably sort of almost medieval, maybe a little bit later, like early enlightenment, maybe or something. I don't know, it's like, it's an alien society with a lesser technological knowledge than what was at the time. So something like that is such a monumental event. It's supposedly recorded multiple times throughout history, but it's been so long in so many thousand years that the records are very hazy. And so the story is basically an isolated setting where a bunch of men who are in an observatory are waiting for this cosmic event to happen. And while they're waiting for this to happen, people are starting to lose their shit in the environment around them. And eventually, yeah, a religious fanatic comes in and he's like, these instruments are evil and they're bringing the apocalypse upon us. And he like smashes all the apparatus and everything like that.
And I don't know, I read the story a long time ago. I'd actually like to cover it on Chrononauts probably because it is a really significant story. And while I'm not going to say with authority that it is the best science fiction short story of all time, it is a pretty cool story. And I think it does cover some of the same themes that this one does, but perhaps in a more powerful way, I guess, and it does feel like it goes a bit darker. So especially with the ending, the ending is not so optimistic, but it's also ambiguous. So you don't really know, you know, maybe maybe things turn out all right in the end, but you're not sure. And that was 1941 while the Second World War was happening.
Nate:
Yeah, well, certainly have plenty of time to cover lots of Asimov stories in the future. He did write a fair amount of them. He does note that unlike Van Vogt or Heinlein, his reputation as a first rate science fiction author built up slowly. He wasn't an instant success like either of those two.
JM:
Interesting.
Nate:
But yeah, despite the fact that, you know, this is very, very early for him. It's good. I did like this one a lot. I don't think it's my favorite out of all the stories we covered in this issue. But yeah, I definitely would want to revisit Asimov a fair amount on the podcast and we'll see when we cover some of the other big three authors.
Gretchen:
Yeah, really glad this was my first. I think it really set up how much Asimov can offer. So I really want to read more of his work after this.
Nate:
It's definitely a good introduction. Yeah.
JM:
It'll be a cool, it'll be a cool experience. I'm actually, I think it's really cool Gretchen that this is the first real experience you have with him. It definitely unique from a nowadays perspective, like how many people could say they started with "Trends" in 1939.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Maybe people who read it at the time.
Gretchen:
Even though this isn't his first since it's nearly his first, maybe I should try to go in chronological order.
Nate:
Yeah. "Marooned Off Vesta", you can find that in Amazing I'm sure, it might be a little sillier than this one.
JM:
But I can't remember if I read that one or not. But I don't think, yeah, I mean, he just has so many short stories. And the thing is, even when it did happen that the short story magazines were not doing well, he was writing for magazines like Playboy. Despite what it's mostly known for, it did publish a lot of really cool fiction.
Nate:
Yeah, early on.
JM:
Especially in the 1970s and 60s, I think.
I was wondering - "Ad Astra" or "Trends", guys?
Nate:
For title?
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
I like "Ad Astra" more, but I can see why they went with "Trends".
JM:
I do too. Yeah. You know, it's really funny. Asimov complained about some of Campbell's title changes because apparently that was something he often did was change the title of a story. And there were hints as where Asimov didn't like that. But for some reason, in this case, he seems to have thought positively of it.
But yeah, for me, "Ad Astra" sums up what I think the story is trying to tell you more. Like, "Trends" sounds, I mean, yeah, that's the kind of the revelation at the end. It's just a pendulum swaying. It's not as big of a deal as it might seem. It might be easy to swing people back the way you want, right? And that's a nice message, but I like that being at the very end, you know? I don't want the title to be that. This is just trends. I don't know. "Ad Astra" is good. Sorry, guys, you were wrong.
Gretchen:
"Ad Astra" feels more like it relates personally to the people in that moment where "Trends", it's like the overall historical perspective.
Nate:
Yeah, overall trends.
JM:
Yeah. Trends suck.
Gretchen:
Just a fad.
JM:
Yeah. Trends are bad. The great southern trend kill. Okay, sorry. But yeah, yeah, "Ad Astra" is good. I would have kept that title. I guess it sounds like, I don't know, maybe, maybe there was an idea that, yeah, it's pretentious sounding Latin title. Like, why would we use something like that? I don't know. I got it.
Nate:
It definitely did not seem like Campbell's thing. All right, so that's pretty much all I had on this one. Did you guys have anything else or should we move on?
JM:
I think we're good to go, but yeah, more Asimov in the future, for certain. Yeah, definitely. Like, this is kind of definitely re-energized my interest in rereading and reading some of the, especially the short fiction, but some of the other stuff too, maybe. So, yeah.
Bibliography:
Asimov, Isaac - "The Early Asimov" (1972)
Asimov, Isaac - "Before the Golden Age" (1974)
Asimov, Isaac - "In Memory Yet Green" (1979)
Nevala-Lee, Alec - "Astounding" (2018)
Music:
Hoffman, F - "Ouverture 'Jupiter'" (1883) https://www.loc.gov/item/2023850031/
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