Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection

by Isaac Asimov

  In a way, this story shows the negative side of computers, and in this period I also wrote stories that showed the possible vengeful reactions of computers or robots that are mistreated. For computers, there is “Someday,” which appeared in the August 1956 issue of Infinity Science Fiction, and for robots (in automobile form) see “Sally,” which appeared in the May-June 1953 issue of Fantastic.

  11. “Feminine Intuition:” My robots are almost always masculine, though not necessarily in an actual sense of gender. After all, I give them masculine names and refer to them as “he.” At the suggestion of a female editor, Judy-Lynn del Rey, I wrote “Feminine Intuition,” which appeared in the October 1969 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It showed, for one thing, that I could do a feminine robot, too. She was still metal, but she had a narrower waistline than my usual robots and had a feminine voice, too. Later on, in my book Robots and Empire, there was a chapter in which a humanoid female robot made her appearance. She played a villainous role, which might surprise those who know of my frequently displayed admiration of the female half of humanity.

  12. “The Bicentennial Man:” This story, which first appeared in 1976 in a paperback anthology of original science fiction, Stellar #2, edited by Judy-Lynn del Rey, was my most thoughtful exposition of the development of robots. It followed them in an entirely different direction from that in “The Last Question. “ What it dealt with was the desire of a robot to become a man and the way in which he carried out that desire, step by step. Again, I carried the plot all the way to its logical conclusion. I had no intention of writing this story when I started it. It wrote itself, and turned and twisted in the typewriter. It ended as the third favorite of mine among all my stories. Ahead of it come only “The Last Question,” mentioned above, and “The Ugly Little Boy,” which is not a robot story.

  13. The Caves of Steel: Meanwhile, at the suggestion of Horace L. Gold, editor of Galaxy, I had written a robot novel. I had resisted doing so at first for I felt that my robot ideas only fit the short story length. Gold, however, suggested I write a murder mystery dealing with a robot detective. I followed the suggestion partway. My detective was a thoroughly human Elijah Baley (perhaps the most attractive character I ever invented, in my opinion), but he had a robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw. The book, I felt, was the perfect fusion of mystery and science fiction. It appeared as a three-part serial in the October, November, and December 1953 issues of Galaxy, and Doubleday published it as a novel in 1954.

  What surprised me about the book was the reaction of the readers. While they approved of Lije Baley, their obvious interest was entirely with Daneel, whom I had viewed as a mere subsidiary character. The approval was particularly intense in the case of the women who wrote to me. (Thirteen years after I had invented Daneel, the television series Star Trek came out, with Mr. Spock resembling Daneel quite closely in character-something which did not bother me-and I noticed that women viewers were particularly interested in him, too. I won’t pretend to analyze this.)

  14. The Naked Sun: The popularityof Lije and Daneel led me to write a sequel, The Naked Sun, which appeared as a three-part serial in the October, November, and December 1956 issues of Astounding and was published as a novel by Doubleday in 1957. Naturally, the repetition of the success made a third novel seem the logical thing to do. I even started writing it in 1958, but things got in the way and, what with one thing and another, it didn’t get written till 1983.

  15. The Robots of Dawn: This, the third novel of the Lije Baley/R. Daneel series, was published by Doubleday in 1983. In it, I introduced a second robot, R. Giskard Reventlov, and this time I was not surprised when he turned out to be as popular as Daneel.

  16. Robots and Empire: When it was necessary to allow Lije Baley to die (of old age), I felt I would have no problem in doing a fourth book in the series, provided I allowed Daneel to live. The fourth book, Robots and Empire, was published by Doubleday in 1985. Lije’s death brought some reaction, but nothing at all compared to the storm of regretful letters I received when the exigencies of the plot made it necessary for R. Giskard to die.

  Of the short stories I have listed as “notable” you may have noticed that three-”Franchise,” “The Last Question,” and “The Feeling of Power”-are not included in the collection you are now holding. This is not an oversight, nor is it any indication that they are not suitable for collection. The fact is that each of the three is to be found in an earlier collection, Robot Dreams, that is a companion piece for this one. It wouldn’t be fair to the reader to have these stories in both collections.

  To make up for that, I have included in Robot Visions nine robot stories that are not listed above as “notable.” This is no way implies that these nine stories are inferior, merely that they broke no new ground.

  Of these nine stories, “Galley Slave” is one of my favorites, not only because of the wordplay in the title, but because it deals with a job I earnestly wish a robot would take off my hands. Not many people have gone through more sets of galleys than I have.

  “Lenny” shows a human side of Susan Calvin that appears in no other story, while “Someday” is my foray into pathos. “Christmas Without Rodney” is a humorous robot story, while “Think! “ is a rather grim one. “Mirror Image” is the only short story I ever wrote that involves R. Daneel Olivaw, the co-hero of my robot novels. “Too Bad!” and “Segregationist” are both robot stories based on medical themes. And, finally, “Robot Visions” is written specifically for this collection.

  So it turns out that my robot stories have been almost as successful as my Foundation books, and if you want to know the truth (in a whisper, of course, and please keep this confidential), I like my robot stories better.

  Finally, a word about the essays in this book. The first essay was written in 1956. All the others have appeared in 1974 and thereafter. Why the eighteen-year gap?

  Easy. I wrote my first robot story when I was nineteen, and I wrote them, on and off, for over thirty years without really believing that robots would ever come into existence in any real sense-at least not in my lifetime. The result was that I never once wrote a serious essay on robotics. I might as well expect myself to have written serious essays on Galactic empires and psychohistory. In fact, my 1956 piece is not a serious discussion of robotics but merely a consideration of the use of robots in science fiction.

  It was not till the mid-1970s, with the development of the microchip, that computers grew small enough, versatile enough, and cheap enough to allow computerized machinery to become practical for industrial use. Thus, the industrial robot arrived-extremely simple compared to my imaginary robots, but clearly en route.

  And, as it happened, in 1974, just as robots were becoming real, I began to write essays on current developments in science, first for American Way magazine and then for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.

  It became natural to write an occasional piece on real robotics. In addition, Byron Preiss Visual

  Publications, Inc., began to put out a remarkable series of books under the general title of Isaac Asimov’s Robot City, and I was asked to do essays on robotics for each of them. So it came about that before 1974, I wrote virtually no essays on robotics, and after 1974 quite a few. It’s not my fault, after all, if science finally catches up to my simpler notions.

  Golden Age Ahead

  It seems to be an almost unvarying habit among human beings to find golden ages in the past, both in their own personal lives and in their societies.

  That’s only natural. In the first place, there’s something to it-at least in our personal lives. To those of us who are elderly (or even in their late youth, as I am) there is no question but that there are memories of a time when we were younger and stronger and thinner and more vigorous and less creaky and could perform more frequently and grow tired less frequently and so on. And if that isn’t golden, what is?

  In general, this is naturally extrapolated to the point where whatever society was like in our
teenage years is our view of what society ought to be like. Every change since then is viewed as a deterioration, a degeneration, an abomination.

  Then, too, there are the falsities of memory, which cast a delicious haze over the past, eliminating the annoyances and frustrations and magnifying the joys. Add to that the falsities of history which inevitably produce a greater emphasis on heroism, on dogged determination, on civic virtue, while overlooking squalor, corruption, and injustice.

  And in the sub-universe of science fiction, isn’t this also true? Doesn’t every reader who has been reading for a decade or two remember a “golden age”? Doesn’t he complain that science fiction stories aren’t as good as they used to be? Doesn’t he dream of the classics of the past?

  Of course. We all do that. I do it, too. There is one “Golden Age of Science Fiction” that has actually been institutionalized and frozen in place, and that is the period between 1938 and 1950, with its peak years from 1939 to 1942.

  John W. Campbell, Jr. became editor of Astounding Stories in 1938, changed its name to Astounding Science Fiction, changed its style, and found new writers or encouraged older writers to expand their horizons. He helped develop me, L. Sprague de Camp, Lester del Rey, Theodore Sturgeon, Eric Frank Russell, Hal Clement, Arthur C. Clarke, and many others; and all produced stories that are among the great all-time classics of the genre. In particular, in 1939 Robert A. Heinlein and A. E. Van Vogt both burst on the scene with crackerjack stories.

  Let’s, however, take a closer and unimpassioned look at the Golden Age.

  To begin with, how was it viewed in its own time? Did all the readers sit around, saying, “Golly, gee, wow, I’m living through a Golden Age!”?

  You’d better not believe it. Sure, the young readers who had just come into the field were fascinated, but the older readers who had been reading since the late 1920s were not. Instead, they frequently talked of the “good old days” and longed for their golden age of the Tremaine Astounding, which ran from 1933 to 1938.

  I was one of the old fossils, as a matter of fact. Much as I liked the stories of the Campbell era and much as I enjoyed contributing to them myself, it was of the earlier 1930s that I dreamed. It wasn’t Heinlein that was the epitome to me of science fiction (though I recognized his worth)-it was Jack Williamson’s “The Legion of Space”; it was E. E. Smith’s “Galactic Patrol”; it was Nat Schachner’s “Past, Present, and Future”; it was Charles R. Tanner’s “Tumithak of the Corridors.”

  Even at this very day there is an organization called “First Fandom” (to which I belong), and only those can belong to it who were science fiction fans before 1938.

  And if there were golden ages before the Golden Age, there were also golden ages to still-younger readers after the Golden Age. Indeed, Terry Carr has just published an excellent anthology of stories from 1939 through 1942 entitled Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age.

  How many more have there been? I should guess that there has been one for every three-year interval since the first-to one group of readers or another.

  Think again? Were the stories of your golden age really golden? Have you reread them lately?

  I have reread the stories of my own golden age and found the results spotty indeed. Some of the stories I slavered over as a teenager turned out to be impenetrable and embarrassing when I tackled them again. A few (“Tumithak of the Corridors” for one) held up very well, in my opinion.

  It was clear to me, though, that the general average of writing forty years ago was much lower than the general average later. That, in fact, seems to me to have been a general rule. Magazine science fiction over the last half-century has steadily risen above and away from its pulpish origins.

  That means me, too. I imagine that many people who drooled over “Nightfall,” The Foundation Trilogy, and I, Robot in their teens find some of the gloss gone when they reread them in their thirties.

  (Fortunately for myself, a substantial number do not-and there are always new teenagers entering the field and ready to be dazzled.)

  Why has the quality of writing gone up?

  For one thing, the competition to science fiction has gone. The pulp magazines are gone. The slick magazines scarcely publish fiction. Whereas, some decades back, science fiction magazines-with their small circulation and even smaller financial rewards-could not compete in the marketplace and could gain only raw enthusiasts, there is now comparatively little else for a beginning writer to do, few other places for him to go.

  The competition for space in the science fiction magazines is therefore keener, so that better natural talents reach their pages-and set higher standards for other novices to shoot at.

  I doubt, for instance, that I could possibly have broken into science fiction in 1979 with nothing more than the talent I had when I broke into the field in 1939. (Nor need this discourage new writers-they are learning in a better school in 1979 than I did in 1939.) There is also greater knowledge of science today.

  The writers of my own golden age knew very little science that they didn’t pick up from the lurid newspaper stories of the day (equivalent to learning about sex in the gutter).

  Nowadays, on the other hand, even those science fiction writers who are not particularly educated in science and who don’t particularly use science in their stories nevertheless know much more about science and use it far more skillfully (when they do) than did the creaky old giants of the past. The new writers can’t help it. We now live in a society in which science saturates every medium of communication and the very air we breathe-and the growing ranks of capable science writers see to it that the communications are of high quality.

  What do we face then?

  We will have stories by better writers, dealing with more exciting and more subtle themes in a more intelligently scientific manner.

  Need we worry that it will all come to an end, that science is outpacing science fiction and putting us all out of a job?

  No! What the scientists are doing is exactly the reverse. They are providing us with fresh, new gimmicks daily: new ideas, new possibilities.

  In just the last few days, I have read about the discovery of gases in Venus’s atmosphere which seem to show that Venus could not have been formed in the same way Earth was. I have read about the possibility of setting up a modulated beam of neutrinos that could allow communication through the Earth instead of around it. I have read that the Sun may have a steadily ticking internal clock with the irregularities of the sunspots a superficial modification-but what the clock is and why the modification, we do not know.

  Each of these items can serve as the starting point for a story that might not have been possible to write last year, let alone thirty years ago. And they will be written with the skill and expertise of today.

  These are exciting times for society, for science, for science fiction, for science fiction writers, for science fiction readers. George, Joel, and I are having more fun putting this magazine together all the time; and, we hope, you are having more fun reading it all the time.

  Why not? There’s a Golden Age ahead!

  The All-Human Galaxy

  In I928, “The Skylark Of Space” by Edward E. Smith appeared in Amazing Stories, and was instantly recognized as an important milestone in science fiction.

  Until then, stories involving space travel dealt almost exclusively with the solar system. Trips to the Moon and to Mars were the staples. Visitors from other stellar systems may have been mentioned (as in the case of the visitor from Sirius in Voltaire’s “ Micromegas“) but these were trivial instances.

  Smith, however, introduced interstellar travel as a commonplace thing and placed his heroes and villains within a space-frame that included the entire galaxy. It was the first time this had happened and the readers devoured it and demanded more. The “superscience story” became the hit of the decade. Smith held the lead in this respect for twenty years, although during the first half of his career, John w. Campbell was a close second.
>
  Smith and Campbell viewed the galaxy as including many, many intelligent species. Almost every planet possessed them and Smith, in particular, was most inventive in dreaming up unearthly shapes and characteristics for his alien beings.

  This “many-intelligence galaxy” is not as prominent in science fiction as it once was, but you may find it in contemporary television. In Star Trek and its lesser imitations, it sometimes seemed as though a spaceship could not travel in any direction at random, for a week, without coming across an intelligent species (usually inimical in one way or another.) The visual media are hampered in their ability to represent these aliens imaginatively, for somehow an actor usually exists under the makeup or plastic. The extraterrestrial creatures, therefore, if not human, were nevertheless clearly primate.

  In this connection, though, the science fiction writer, Hal Clement raised an interesting question, which I think of as “Clement’s Paradox.”

  The universe has existed for perhaps fifteen billion years, and if there are many civilizations that have risen here and there among its stars, these must have appeared at any time in the past twelve billion years (allowing three billion for the first to arise).

  It should follow, therefore, that human explorers, when locating an extraterrestrial civilization, would be quite apt to find them anywhere from one to twelve billion years old in the vast majority of cases (assuming them to be very long-lived). If they were not very long-lived, but only endured, say, a million years or less before coming to a natural or a violent end, then almost all planets bearing such civilizations would show signs of the ruins of a long-dead one, or possibly a series of two or more sets of ruins.

  To a lesser extent, in relatively young planetary systems, the civilization might not be ready to arise for anywhere from a million to a billion years.