Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection

by Isaac Asimov

  Consequently, when George Scithers left us, I found it delightful that Kathleen Moloney agreed to be the new editor. It never occurred to me for an instant that a woman couldn’t handle the job just because she was a woman and, as a matter of fact, Kathleen took to it with a kind of rabid delight. She introduced interesting changes and stamped her personality on the magazine.

  But then, there came along the all-too-frequent villain in such cases, the offer-one-can’t-refuse. It may have been Kathleen’s performance here that aroused interest in other publishing houses and-well, one can’t turn down a chance to advance in one’s chosen profession, so we lost Kathleen.

  And yet all is not lost, either. I have on numerous occasions mentioned the charming Shawna McCarthy, who is as sharp as a scalpel, and who is universally liked for the excellent reason that she is universally likable. I like her.

  Shawna served faithfully as right-hand person first to George, and then to Kathleen. In the process, she learned every facet of the editing business and developed (thank goodness) the ambition to hold the top position.

  So when Kathleen left, I said, “It has to be Shawna “ and everyone agreed with me, especially Shawna.

  And here she is. Readers-female and male-I give you Shawna!

  Religion And Science Fiction

  In the November, 1983 issue of Asimov’s, the cover story was “The Gospel According to Gamaliel Crucis “ by that excellent writer, Michael Bishop. It dealt with a sensitive subject-the coming of a savior, or, in effect, the second coming of Christ.

  What makes it even more effective as a science fiction story is that the savior is an extraterrestrial, and not a particularly attractive one to our human eyes since she (!) is a giant mantis. This is entirely legitimate, it seems to me, since if there is other life in the universe, especially intelligent life, one would expect that a truly universal God would be as concerned for them as for us, and would totally disregard physical shape since it is only the “soul,” that inner intellectual and moral identity, that counts.

  What is more, Bishop decided to make the story more powerful by casting it into a biblical shape, dividing it into chapters and verses and making use of a touch of suitable biblical wording.

  The result was a tour de force which we obviously considered quite successful, or we would not have published it. Still we were prepared for the fact that some readers might feel uneasy with, or even offended by, the subject matter and/or style.

  One letter was quite angry, indeed. The writer was “strongly displeased” and considered it “a burlesque of the scriptures” and, finding no other value to the story, considered it to have been written and published only for the sake of the burlesque.

  This can be argued with, of course, but never entirely settled. If a reader sees in it only burlesque, he or she can scarcely be argued out of it. There will always be differences of opinion, often based upon emotion rather than reason, with regard to the value of any work of art.

  But there is something more general here. There is the matter of how science fiction ought to deal with religion, especially our religion. (Few people worry very much about how some other religion is handled, since only our own is the true one.)

  No one wants to offend people unnecessarily, and religion is a touchy subject, as we all know. In that case, might it not be best simply to avoid religious angles altogether in writing science fiction? As our angry correspondent says, “I suggest…that offending any substantial religious group is not the way to win friends or sell magazines.”

  Yes, we know that, and since we do want to win friends and sell magazines, we would not knowingly go out of our way to embarrass and humiliate even non-substantial groups of our readers just for the fun of it.

  But we are also editing a serious science fiction magazine that, we earnestly hope, includes stories of literary value, and it is the very essence of literature that it consider the great ideas and concerns of human history. Surely that complex of ideas that goes under the head of “religion” is one of the most central and essential, and it would be rather a shame to have it declared out of bounds. In fact, for a magazine to self-censor itself out of discussing religion would be to bow to those forces that don’t really believe in our constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and press. If we were to do so, we would be, in a very deep sense, un-American.

  Besides, if we were to try to avoid this very touchy subject where do we stop? I tend to ignore religion in my own stories altogether, except when I absolutely have to have it. Well, I absolutely had to have it in some of my early Foundation stories and in “Nightfall,” and so I made use of it. And, whenever I bring in a religious motif, that religion is bound to seem vaguely Christian because that is the only religion

  I know anything about, even though it is not mine. An unsympathetic reader might think I am “burlesquing” Christianity, but I am not.

  Then, too, it is impossible to write science fiction and really ignore religion. What if we find intelligent beings on other worlds. Do they have a religion? Is our God universal, and is he/she/it their God as well? What do we do about it? What do they do about it?

  This point is almost never taken up but, since it would certainly arise if such beings were discovered in actual fact, science fiction loses touch with reality in taking the easy way out and pretending religion doesn’t exist.

  Or, consider time-travel. I don’t know how many stories have been written about people going back in time to keep Lincoln from being assassinated, but how about people going back in time to keep Jesus from being crucified? Surely that greater feat would occur to someone in actual fact, if time-travel were possible.

  Think of the changes that could be rung on such a theme. If Jesus were rescued while on his way to the site of crucifixion, and if the rescue were made by modern technology-a helicopter or something more advanced, while the Roman soldiers were held off by rifle-fire at the very least-would it not seem to the people of the time that supernatural forces were rescuing Jesus? Would it not seem that angels were coming to the aid of a true savior? Would it not establish Christianity as the true religion at once?

  Or would it? Clearly, it was God’s divine purpose (assuming the God of the Bible exists) to have the crucifixion take place in order that Jesus serve as a divine atonement for Adam’s sin. Would the subversion of this plan be allowed to take place?

  It’s a nice dilemma, and it is within the province of legitimate science fiction. Yet who has ever considered writing such a story, even though it would give us a chance to deal with what many consider the central event of history? The story would be an extremely difficult one to write, and I wouldn’t feel up to it myself, but I think it is primarily self-censorship that keeps it from being written.

  For that matter, what if we went back in time and found that the biblical Jesus never existed?

  The mere existence of time-travel makes all these speculations irresistible, so is it possible that very religious people might object to time-travel themes, and call them blasphemous, simply because of the possibilities they give rise to?

  The correspondent says in his letter, “Dr. Asimov, I know that you are an atheist-” and there may be the implication that because of this I am insensitive to the feelings of religionists, or perhaps even anxious to make them seem ridiculous.

  As a matter of fact, I have frequently, in my writings, made it clear that I have never encountered any convincing evidence of the existence of the biblical God, and that I am incapable of accepting that existence on faith alone. That makes me an atheist, but, although this may surprise some Americans, the Constitution safeguards my right to be one and to proclaim myself one.

  Nevertheless, although I am an atheist, I am not a proselytizing one; I am not a missionary; I do not treat atheism as a kind of true faith that I must force on everyone. After all, I have published more than almost anyone, about 20,000,000 words so far, and I have frequently discussed controversial problems.

  You are free to go through
my writings and search for any sign that I ridicule religion as such. I have opposed those people who attack legitimate scientific findings (evolution, as an example) in the name of religion, and who do so without evidence, or (worse yet) with distorted and false evidence. I don’t consider them true religionists, however, and I am careful to point out that they disgrace religion, and are a greater danger to honest religion than to science.

  And suppose I weren’t an atheist. My parents were Jewish and I might have been brought up an Orthodox Jew, or become one of my own volition. Might it then be argued that I would naturally favor any story burlesquing Christianity?

  Or suppose I were a Methodist; would I therefore look for stories that burlesqued Judaism, or

  Catholicism-or atheism?

  If I were in the mood to run this magazine in such a way as to offend “any substantial religious group” I wouldn’t have to be an atheist. I could do it if I were anything at all, provided only that I were a bigot, or an idiot, or both.

  In actual fact, I am neither and again, I offer my collected writings as evidence. As for Shawna, she doesn’t have a similar body of written works to cite but, if I may serve as character witness, I can tell you right now she is certainly not a bigot, and a hundred times certainly not an idiot.

  Needless to say, I am sorry that our correspondent was upset by “The Gospel According to Gamaliel Crucis.” If we lived in an ideal world, we would never publish any story that upset anyone. In this case, though, we had to choose. On the one hand, we had a remarkable story that considered, quite fearlessly, an important idea, and we felt that most readers would recognize this point-if not at once then upon mature consideration. On the other hand, we had a story that might offend some of our readers.

  We made the choice. We put quality and importance ahead of the chance of some offence. We hope that our angry correspondent will consider the matter again and see that the story is far more than a burlesque. He might even give Bishop points for skill and courage.

  Time-Travel

  I have often said, in speaking and in writing, that the qualified science fiction writer avoids the scientifically impossible. Yet I can’t bring myself to make that rule an absolute one, because there are some plot devices that offer such dramatic possibilities that we are forced to overlook the utter implausibilities that are involved. The most glaring example of this is time-travel.

  There are infinite tortuosities one can bring to plot development if only you allow your characters to move along the time axis, and I, for one, can’t resist them, so that I have written a number of time-travel stories, including one novel, The End of Eternity.

  You can get away with a kind of diluted time-travel story, if you have your character move in the direction we all move-from present to future-and suspend the usual consciousness that accompanies the move by having him (please understand that, for conciseness I am using “him” as a shorthand symbol for “him or her”) sleep away a long period of time, as Rip van Winkle did, or, better, having him frozen for an indefinite period at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Better still, you might make use of relativistic notions and have your character move into the future by having his subjective time slowed through motion at speeds close to that of light, or motion through an enormously intense gravitational field.

  These are plausible devices that do not do damage to the structure of the Universe, but they are one-way motions, with no return possible. I did it in Pebble in the Sky although I made use of an unknown (and unspecified) natural law involving nuclear fission, which was then quite new. This was a weakness in the plot, but I got past it in the first couple of pages and never brought it up again so I hoped no one would notice it. (Alas, many did.)

  The same device can be used to make repeated jumps, always into the future, or to bring someone from the past into the present.

  Once you have a device that sends someone into the future, however, it is asking too much of writer-nature not to use some device-such as a blow on the head-to send a person into the past. (Mark Twain does it in “ A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court.”) For that, there is some scientific justification at the subatomic level, where individual particles are involved and entropy considerations are absent. For ordinary objects, where entropy is involved, there is none.

  But all one-shot changes in either direction are only devices to start the story, which then usually proceeds in a completely timebound fashion. That’s not the true, or pure, time-travel story. In true time- travel, the characters can move, at will, back and forth in time. Nor is it fair if this is done through supernatural intervention as in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. It must be done by an artificial device under the control of a human being.

  The first true time-travel story was H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, published in 1895. Wells, who was probably the best science fiction writer of all time [If others, since, seem to have reached greater heights, it is only because they stand on Well’s shoulders.], carefully explained the rationale behind it. It requires four dimensions to locate an object: it is somewhere on the north-south axis, somewhere on the east-west axis, somewhere on the up-down axis, and somewhere on the past-future axis. It exists not only in a certain point of three-dimensional space but at a certain instant of time. A merely three-dimensional object is as much a mathematical abstraction as is a two-dimensional plane, or a one-dimensional line, or a zero-dimensional point. Suppose you considered the Great Wall of China as existing for zero time and therefore consisting of three dimensions only. It would then not exist at all and you could walk through its supposed position at any time.

  Since duration is a dimension like height, width, and thickness, and since we can travel at will north and south, east and west, and (if only by jumping) up and down, why shouldn’t we also travel yesterward and tomorrowward as soon as we work out a device for the purpose?

  That was 1895, remember, and Wells’s analysis at that time had some shadow of justification. But then, in 1905, came Einstein’s special theory of relativity, and it became clear that time is a dimension but it is not like the three spatial dimensions, and it can’t be treated as though it were.

  And yet Wells’s argument was so winning and the plots it made possible so enticing that science fiction writers generally just ignore Einstein and follow Wells. (1 do so myself in The End of Eternity. )

  The dead giveaway that true time-travel is flatly impossible arises from the well-known “paradoxes” it entails. The classic example is “What if you go back into the past and kill your grandfather when he was still a little boy?” In that case, you see, the murderer was never born, so who killed the little boy?

  But you don’t need anything so drastic. What if you go back and change any of the many small items that made it possible for your father and mother to meet, or to fall in love after they met, or to marry after they fall in love. Suppose you merely interfered with the crucial moment of sex and had it happen the next evening, or perhaps just five minutes later than it did, so that another sperm fertilized the ovum rather than the one that should have. That, too, would mean the person committing the act would never come into existence, so who would commit the act?

  In fact, to go into the past and do anything would change a great deal of what followed perhaps everything that followed. So complex and hopeless are the paradoxes that follow, so wholesale is the annihilation of any reasonable concept of causality, that the easiest way out of the irrational chaos that results is to suppose that true time-travel is, and forever will be, impossible.

  However, any discussion of this gets so philosophical that I lose patience and would rather consider something simpler.

  Suppose you get into a time machine and travel twenty-four hours into the future. The assumption is that you are traveling only in the time dimension, and that the three spatial dimensions are unchanged. However, as is perfectly obvious, Earth is moving through the three dimensions in a very complex way.

  The point on the surface on which the time-mac
hine is located is moving about the Earth’s axis. The Earth is moving about the center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system, and also about the center of gravity of the Earth-Sun system; is accompanying the Sun in its motion about the center of the galaxy, and the galaxy in its undefined motion relative to the center of gravity of the Local Group and to the center of gravity of the universe as a whole if there is one.

  You might, of course, say that the time-machine partakes of the motion of the Earth, and wherever Earth goes, the time-machine goes, too. Suppose, though, we consider the Earth’s motion (with the solar system generally) around the galactic center. Its speed relative to that center is estimated to be about 220 kilometers per second. If the time-machine travels twenty-four hours into the future in one second, it travels 220 kilometers x 86,400 (the number of seconds in a day), or 19,008,000 kilometers in one second. That’s over sixty-three times the speed of light. If we don’t want to break the speed-of-light limit, then we must take not less than twenty-three minutes to travel one day forward (or backward) in time.

  What’s more, I suspect that considerations of acceleration would have to be involved. The time- machine would have to accelerate to light speed and then decelerate from it, and perhaps the human body could only stand so much acceleration in the time direction. Considering that the human body has never in all its evolution accelerated at all in the time direction, the amount of acceleration it ought to be able to endure might be very little indeed, so that the time-machine would have to take considerably more than an hour to make a one-day journey-say, at a guess, twelve hours.

  That would mean we could only gain half a day per day, at most, in traveling through time. Spending ten years to go twenty years into the future, would not be in the least palatable. (Can a time machine carry a life-support system of that order of magnitude?)