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Isaac Asimov
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 Isaac Asimov's body of work is part of the essential corpus of hard science fiction. As a teenager in
the 1930s he was one of the first generation of science fiction fans who became a science fiction writer. He was
a leading light of Campbell's Astounding in the 1940s with his robot stories, embodying his famous
"Three Laws," collected in 1950 as I,
Robot, as well as his Foundation series, later published in the 1960s as
The Foundation Trilogy. All the while he was progressing through college and graduate school, finally attaining
his Ph.D. in biochemistry and a tenured teaching position at Boston University School of Medicine. At the
height of his powers and popularity in sf, he turned to writing popular science essays and books in the late 1950s
and became the greatest living writer in that field of the second half of the 20th century. Immensely prolific,
he had published more than 400 books, most of them nonfiction, before his death in 1992.
Asimov was a rationalist and a true believer in science as a way of knowing, and that attitude
permeated his writing and emanated from his personal affect. He was an indefatigable public figure in the science
fiction world throughout his adult life, a charismatic center of attention. A protege of John W. Campbell (whom
at least until the 1950s he used to visit weekly whenever possible for editorial sessions), Asimov was devoted
to hard science fiction, generous in his praise of other hard science fiction writers, and always careful to
distinguish hard sf from other varieties.
Over several decades, Asimov wrote a number of stories about supercomputers (not always the
same one) named Multivac. "The Machine that Won the War" (1961), for instance, is a clever Asimovian retelling
of the folk tale of John Henry and the steam drill, the legend of the man who beat the machine. It is an
hard science allegory of thinking men and thinking machines that underscores the limits of technology
without undermining the basic technological optimism of sf. It is also an interesting counterpoint to Asimov's
"The Last Question," an earlier Multivac story, and a more serious (and uncharacteristically metaphysical)
consideration of humanity's relation to machines. As is this story.
"The Life and Times of Multivac" was written in 1973 at the request of the New York Times
Sunday Magazine for a science fiction story about humans and machines. Asimov constructed a provocative
intellectual situation using conventional materials and raised the stakes by invoking free will versus
determinism, achieving in the end both a solved problem and another, posed, problem. It is interesting to note that Asimov's
original title for the story was "Mathematical Games." It is in one sense a rethinking of "The Machine
That Won the War," but with significantly less technological optimism and more sophisticated execution.
But no matter how intellectual and abstract the problem, an individual human can take action
using knowledge of science (and math) in the external world to solve it. This is the belief which was integral to
Asimov's life and writing, the faith of hard sf.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.