Technologies of Immortality: Course Assignments and Critical Texts

With this post, I wanted to talk a bit more about my immortality-focused team-taught Honors course. Specifically, I want to talk about two readings that I assigned that were not science fiction, but rather about it. (My previous post about the precise stories we assigned may be of use.)

For Honors students here at UT, these "Dialectics" courses replace their usual general education requirements. Thus it was important to me that I just not assign literature, but also that I assign something about fiction, to expose the students to literary criticism. I ended up deciding that the two most useful pieces would be two pieces that have been influential on my understanding of science fiction, though neither is a traditional work of literary criticism. I paired each one with one of our groups of sf texts and thus one of our assignments.

Isaac Asimov: "Social Science Fiction"

I've posted here in the past about Isaac Asimov's three-part typology of science fiction: adventure-dominant, technology-dominant, and sociology-dominant. These he articulated in his introductions to the 1962 anthologies Soviet Science Fiction and More Soviet Science Fiction. What I only recently learned (thanks to a query on Reddit) is that he originally discussed the three types of sf in somewhat different terms in a 1952 essay called "Social Science Fiction"; I don't know why this essay wasn't reprinted in Asimov on Science Fiction along with the two Soviet ones, but it has been reprinted a number of other places, including Damon Knight's 1977 anthology Turning Points: Essays on the Art of Science Fiction.

In this essay, he calls the three categories "adventure," "gadget," and "social," and I like how he articulates the differences through a series of examples about how you'd write a story about the automobile if it was sf. An adventure story about the car would use it in a thrilling chase, a gadget story about the car would focus on how internal combustion engines work in exhaustive detail, and a social story about the car would have it already having been invented and focus on the question of "what do we do about automobile accidents? Men, women, and children are being killed by automobiles faster than by artillery shells or airplane bombs. What can be done?" (41).

As you might guess from the essay's title, he's mostly concerned with what social science fiction is and how it works, giving definitions and examples. It's got its weird parts (there's a long digression about the "chess game" of history I don't care for at all) but overall it's a strong definition of sf that gives student writers a lot to work with. I particularly like his statement, "It is easy to predict an automobile in 1880; it is very hard to predict a traffic problem" (41). What social sf tries to do, though, is predict those traffic problems.

Social Science Fiction Paper

What my first paper assignment for the students asked, then, is that they look at one or two stories from the course and think about how it was exploring what you might called the "traffic problem" of immortality. It's easy to predict cryonics, consciousness uploading, or genetic life extension in the 2020s; what's harder to predict is what the implications for society are. They could look at one story in detail, or they could compare two; they could explicitly bring in Asimov if they wanted, or an essay from the MIT Technology Review we had assigned about genetic life extension. (I also said they could cite some stuff I had referred to in class and linked to on Canvas, but not assigned as reading: a New York Times article about cryonics, an MIT Technology Review article about mind uploading, a Jo Walton blog post about "incluing," an essay by Patrick Parrinder about scientists in sf, and some other stuff.)

Here's the prompt:

Overall I was happy with how these came out. Lots of good insights and connections. Perhaps most extraordinarily, the texts the students selected were basically evenly balanced! If you are a writing instructor, you will know how rarely this happens when you give options; everyone will gravitate towards one or two texts. But in this case, every text was chosen by several students.

Grading sixty four-page papers isn't great, especially when you're also teaching two sections of a writing course, but I was able to make it work by just stretching the grading out across an entire month.

China Miéville: "Science, Fiction and Science Fiction"

I find the Asimov piece very useful as a teacher and a thinker—I even cite it in my never-complete book. But it represents a view of sf I don't totally agree with, and in the essay, even Asimov admits it's not quite the full picture, as he struggles to place Ray Bradbury in any of his three categories. So it was important to me that we also talk about how I primarily view science fiction, what I sometimes think of as the doubling effect. This is described really well by China Miéville in his introduction to H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon, and I'm forever quoting it to people.

Basically, Miéville's argument is that sf uses "rationalized alienation" to present other worlds to the reader: this isn't the world you live in, but it's different along rational lines. However, sf isn't really about science or the future, no matter what some people (like Asimov) might say. It's about now, using metaphors.

This is definitely true of a lot of the works we read in this course. Is Will McIntosh's "Bridesicle" about a possible future for cryonics? Sure. But it's really about now, about how men treat women as lifeless bodies that solely exist for their own pleasure... even when their intentions are ostensibly good! Is José Pablo Iriarte's "Proof by Induction" about a technology that lets us access the memories of the deceased? Sure. But it's really about now, about how we're unable to let go of the dead even when that's the healthy thing for us to do. Is Ren Qing's "Resurrection" about a soldier brought back to life? Sure. But it's really about now, about how you might be "dead," but it doesn't matter, the government needs you to go back out to the front line. Each of these sf stories takes a metaphor and makes it literal.

Nicely, Sam "qntm" Hughes made this point about his own story "Lena," one of the ones I assigned: 

Quite a lot of science fiction isn't about what it's about.

"Lena" is about uploading, but uploading isn't real. It doesn't exist.

...

The reason "Lena" is a concerning story isn't that one day we may be able to upload one another and when that happens we will do terrible things to those uploads. This isn't a discussion about what if, about whether an upload is a human being or should have rights. (I want to be abundantly clear: within the fictional context of "Lena", uploads definitely are human beings, and therefore automatically, inalienably, have rights.) This is about appetites which, as we are all uncomfortably aware, already exist within human nature. Upload technology is not the last missing piece of this.

Miéville argues that the appeal is that it's not just metaphor, you get the metaphor but also the literal truth. As he says of Gulliver's Travels, "Gulliver's journey to Brobdingnag... clearly casts a remorseless light on Swift's own society; it also, however, features a sword fight with a giant wasp, a passage the enjoyment of which depends on the specific uncanny/​estranging impact of literalizing the impossible: simply, it is a great, weird idea. Weirdness is good to think with, and is also its own end" (xviii). If it was just metaphor, you wouldn't get the sword fight, and that's what makes the story awesome!

This was particularly why I assigned Joe Haldeman's "Four Short Novels," which I think has absolutely no value if you think of sf in an Asimovian sense; he doesn't want to tell us anything about what the year 3001 might be like. Rather, he wants us to reflect on the society we live in now—it's a purely Miévillian piece of sf. 

Final Reflective Paper

I did want there to some kind of writing assignment tied to the readings from the last two weeks of class; I also wanted there to be an assignment that explicitly brought together the different strands of the course, which we didn't otherwise have. But this had to be manageable for both the students and for me. They were doing big group research papers for Cragun, and I would have less than a week to grade whatever I assigned, so it couldn't be a big paper.

I ended up assigning a 1½-page paper that only had to be three paragraphs long. My thought was that the paper would have to be about just one story from the second half of the course, and that it would have to make one concrete, specific connection to something from the sociology or science components of the course.

Here's the prompt:

I'm only halfway through reading these as I write this up back on May 3rd, but overall I am enjoying them so far. They're easy reads, easy to grade, and the students are making solid connections.

Unlike the previous paper, though, there's a clear clustering: a huge plurality of papers about Paolo Bacigalupi's "Pop Squad," tying it to something Professor Cragun taught them about overpopulation. The runner up is Orson Scott Card's "Skipping Stones" and income inequality.

But even in just half the submissions, every story has been represented once. A few about Haldeman's "Four Short Novels," a couple about "Lena," one about Greg Egan's "Border Guards" and religion, and one about Ken Liu's "Staying Behind" and religion. And some of the angles on "Pop Squad" have been unique; in particular, I got a couple good papers about aspects of gender I hadn't thought about. Additionally, I was worried about the students only picking sociology as the thing to connect to, but I did thus far get a couple about science: one about how what they learned about neurons is oversimplified in "Staying Behind" and "The Gods Have Not Died in Vain" and another about the issues of preserving bodies in liquid nitrogen, which was briefly mentioned in "Four Short Novels."

No one is directly citing Asimov or Miéville, but most are clearly thinking about their sociological issue in either an Asimovian or Miévillian sense, either arguing these stories show us something about the future, or that they show us something about our own society through the lens of sf.

As is often the case in teaching, I don't know if they had fun, but I did, and that's what matters to me.

Science Fiction and the Hermit Crab

In my immortality Honors class (which is probably due a post of its own, but at this point, I'll just wait until the semester is over), the students read "Lena" last week, which is a short story by Sam "qntm" Hughes that's written in the form of a Wikipedia article. As I prepared to teach it, this got me thinking: was there a term for stories, especially science fiction stories, told in nonnarrative forms? I could think of a couple examples right off the top of my head other than Lena; one was Isaac Asimov's thiotimoline stories, which are written in the form of peer-reviewed chemistry articles, another was Yoon Ha Lee's "Entropy War," which is written in the form of rules for a dice game. Some people love this form: Hughes uses it a lot, actually, so does Lee; among its most famous practitioners is surely Stanislaw Lem, who wrote a number of works of fiction in the form of introductions or reviews for books that did not exist!

I posted on r/PrintSF and r/AskLiteraryStudies asking if anyone else knew a term for these kind of tales; the latter was a dud, but the denizens of PrintSF (my favorite subreddit) came up with a bunch of examples and a couple suggestions for terms.

"Epistolary fiction" was suggested, and as a Victorianist, I am of course very aware of epistolary fiction, but what strikes me about all the examples I came up with is that it's a narrative told through a nonnarrative form. I have long had a fascination with what you might call the "non-novel novel," such as Nabokov's Pale Fire, a novel in the form of a poem with annotations and other critical apparatus. Epistolary fiction uses narrative forms, like letters and diaries, for the most part. (I once tried to do this myself. I began a book in the form of an episode guide to a fictional 1980s BBC science fiction show; my writing group seemed largely baffled but were game for it.)

There's also the term the "false document" story, which is one I'm not very familiar with, to be honest, and I'm trying to track down its precise origin and meaning. I think "false document" probably includes both epistolary fiction and what I'm trying to capture here.

The term I really liked, and had not heard before, so thanks to the PrintSF poster who suggested it, was "hermit crab fiction." If you Google "hermit crab fiction," the top hit is a locked Medium post by Dan Brotzel, but I was able to find it on the Wayback Machine. He defines them as "stories made from found verbal structures such as a shopping list or board game rules or FAQs or even a penalty charge notice," but he's not the originator of the term, which largely seems to be one used by creative writers, not literary critics. He doesn't really explain the term, but I assumed it was something like a story disguising itself by looking like something else.

But through him I was able to trace its origin, which actually comes out of creative nonfiction. Specifically, the term "hermit crab essay" was coined by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in their textbook Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction (McGraw-Hill, 2005*). They define it as a form of lyric essay that "appropriates other forms as an outer covering, to protect its soft, vulnerable underbelly. It is an essay that deals with material that seems born without its carapace—material that is soft, exposed, and tender, and must look elsewhere to find the form that will best contain it" (111). So in its original concept, the "hermit crab" metaphor was about emotional vulnerability, something of importance to creative nonfiction, I assume, but not necessarily other genres of writing.

The emphasis on nonnarrative form isn't there in this original definition, as they say the "shells" may come "from fiction and poetry, but they also don't hesitate to armor themselves in more mundane structures, such as the descriptions in a mail-order catalog or entries in a checkbook register" (111). So if you're talking about nonfiction, a fictional form is a transformation. As the term has caught on later, though, in its use by fiction writers, it mostly seems to be about nonnarrative forms, as I said above.

They end their section on the hermit crab with this:

Think in terms of transformation. The word itself means to move across forms, to be changed. Think of the hermit crab and his soft, exposed abdomen. Think of the experiences you have that are too raw, too dangerous to write about. What if you found the right shell, the right armor? How could you be transformed? (113)

There's a big emphasis on emotional expression and protection from this transformation. To move back into science fiction, where I started, there's clearly something different at work. "Lena" and the thiotimoline stories and "Entropy War" are not about emotional vulnerability. Indeed, you might argue they're almost about the opposite. There are a lot of these hermit crab sf stories; just while writing this blog post I thought about three more I hadn't before!

I can't find any evidence of previous work on nonnarative forms in sf (which isn't to say it doesn't exist, as I haven't looked very much yet), so it seems to me something worth thinking about and theorizing further.

* At least, 2005 is the copyright date given on my library's first edition copy. The catalog entry, however, includes 2004 in the call number, and some people on the Internet claim it came out in 2003, so who knows when it was actually released.

Review: The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

Before we begin, I want to point out that my last-ever review of The Avengers: The Lost Episodes has gone up at Unreality SF. I've really enjoyed this series, and I will miss it. A beautifully written, performed, and produced slice of the 1960s here in the 2010s. Like I said in this review, it captured everything I enjoyed about the old black-and-white 30-minute Danger Mans back in the day.

Hardcover, 990 pages
Published 1994 (contents: 1841-1994)
Acquired March 2008
Read March 2017

The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF

edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

A thousand-page anthology devoted to a subgenre feels like an argument to me. A shorter book would claim to be nothing more than a sampling, while even a thousand-page book devoted to whole genre of science fiction couldn't rightly claim comprehensiveness. But with one thousand pages and over sixty stories from a single subgenre, The Ascent of Wonder can claim to be defining that subgenre's entire form and purpose. Unfortunately, it gets off to a rough start: I found the introductions (there are three!) by Gregory Benford and Kathryn Cramer more befuddling than illuminating, but I keyed in on a passage from David Hartwell's introduction: "Hard sf is about the beauty of truth. It is a metaphorical or symbolic representation of the wonder at the perception of truth that is experienced at the moment of scientific discovery" (30). I don't know that I entirely agree, but it's an intriguing formulation that explains why Hartwell and Cramer picked the stories they did for this anthology.

Judging by the stories included here, Hartwell and Cramer's definition of hard sf is a lot more capacious than my own. I love Cordwainer Smith, and "No, No, Not Rogov!" is indeed about the "perception of truth that is experienced at the moment of scientific discovery," but the inclusion of stories like this make me think that definition isn't specific enough-- I don't think Smith cares about science except as a source of beautiful imagery and fantastic ideas, and if sf is to be "hard" I feel like it needs something more than that. It's not that Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" or Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" or Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" are bad stories, or even stories uninterested in science, but it's that they're not invested in following the implications of actual science in a way that, say, Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" is-- a story that despite its flaws (or maybe because of them) epitomized the hard sf ethos of logic over all else. There are times I found myself wishing Hartwell and Cramer had included some kind of counterpoint story: if "Nine Lives" by Ursula K. Le Guin (a story that has clones in it, but no science behind them) or "The Very Slow Time Machine" by Ian Watson (which has a neat concept at its heart, but not as far as I can tell, one from actual science) or "The Longest Science Fiction Story Ever Told" by Arthur C. Clarke (which is an unfunny joke about unfunny jokes) are all hard sf, then what isn't? Show me the other side of the subgenre so I can see its edges more clearly.

That said, with over 150 years of stories to pick from, Cramer and Hartwell assembled an excellent collection of stories, and despite some dubious enclosures, I do feel I understand the parameters and possibilities of hard sf more than I did before reading. Some were by authors I knew and loved already: James Blish's "Beep" has a clever and interesting conceit that would make Steven Moffat's head spin. Donald Kingsbury's "To Bring in the Steel" was a surprising tale of a Paris Hilton-esque media floozy discovering a new side of herself on an asteroid mine; after enjoying Psychohistorical Crisis so much, I ought to seek out more of his work. "Waterclap" was an interesting Isaac Asimov story I hadn't read before, but let down by the fact that Asimov can imagine a moon colony and an underwater colony, but can't imagine a woman having any role in either outside of childbearing... in 1970! Le Guin's "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" wasn't a story, but had neat enough ideas (about ant language!) to succeed regardless. And I'm always happy to reread James Blish's "Surface Tension," which is in my sci-fi top five. David Brin's "What Continues, What Fails..." shows science fiction at its best as well, combining future reproduction with black hole physics to deliver a testimony for the human need to reproduce and leave a mark on the universe. (I did appreciate that unlike most anthologists, they included the contextual material with Rudyard Kipling's "With the Night Mail," though I wish they hadn't dumped it all at the end, after the actual story.)

There was the occasional outright bad one: Rudy Rucker's "Message Found in a Copy of Flatland" was sort of a non-story, not doing anything that Flatland didn't do itself; I got the feeling that it was in the book because being a novel, Flatland itself couldn't be. And James P. Hogan's "Making Light" is an unfunny joke stretched out way too long with dubious claims to be science fiction, much less hard sf. I think it's only in here because Hogan didn't write much short fiction, so Cramer and Hartwell had limited options (his novel Inherit the Stars is probably one of the best examples of the subgenre).

I was kind of a sucker for stories involving academia, I guess for obvious reasons. "Davy Jones' Ambassador" by Raymond Z. Gallun was surprisingly interesting, a tale of a professor (who's married to a dean) chasing a giant leviathan. I particularly loved Katherine Maclean's "The Snowball Effect," a rare sociological hard sf tale about a sociology department head defending his program against budget cuts by an overeager administrator by accidentally transforming a local knitting club into a global power. Michael F. Flynn's "Mammy Morgan Played the Organ; Her Daddy Beat the Drum" was surprisingly moving tale of a physics professor hunting ghosts as he destroys his academic career.

This review just scratches the surface of the good stuff contained within. (I want to read more Bob Shaw and Gordon R. Dickson now, for example, and I was very glad to see H. G. Wells's "The Land Ironclads" in this context.) Presumably no anthology is perfect, but I suspect this one comes closer than most: it's probably a better sf anthology than any I've read outside of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame series. I discovered a lot of new stories, developed a new appreciation for a subgenre I've thought little about, and have some new authors to look up.

Isaac Asimov's Typology of Science Fiction

Recently I came across an allusion to the "three primary postulates" of science fiction, described as "what if," "if only," and "if this goes on." I immediately recognized them from the reading of my youth, specifically Isaac Asimov's introduction to the 1962 anthology More Soviet Science Fiction. This was one of many Asimov books passed down to me by my father, and so I imagine I read it at least half a dozen times as a child (though I do not own and have never read the Soviet Science Fiction to which it is a sequel).

In the introduction to MSSF, Asimov first recapitulates his argument from SSF, that American science fiction has three stages:

• Stage One: adventure dominant
• Stage Two: technology dominant
• Stage Three: sociology dominant

I haven't read that, like I said, so I don't know exactly what Asimov imagines fitting into each stage, but you can kind of infer it from his comment that "the best of contemporary American science fiction [is] in Stage Three, dealing with the possible societies of the future that might or might not develop in response to new gadgets, rather than with the gadgets themselves" (7).

In the introduction to MSSF, Asimov develops three gambits for Stage Three science fiction: (like any good scientist, he loves his categories and lists)

• a) What if--
• b) If only--
• c) If this goes on--

It's not really obvious from the gambits themselves, but he imagines each as being a very specific type of sociological extrapolation. Stage Three-A is the "what if" story that is totally divorced from present-day reality, not actually about extrapolation per se, but more like a generalized thought experiment; the example he gives is "What if a human colony on Mars lacks water and cannot get it from Earth?" (8). He claims that this is a "strictly contemporary" move, arising in the 1920s (8), but I think this overlooks some of the proto-sf we call "utopian" that is not about imagining idealized societies, just different ones, such as Edward Bulwer Lytton's The Coming Race (1871) or Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872). Of course, these stories still manage to pack in some commentary on their contemporary societies, albeit more obliquely (as one could imagine happening in Asimov's Mars example).

Stage Three-B he does admit a longer genesis for, as the "If only" question is meant to be a positive one, basically "If only this thing that I think is terrible was not actually true"; his examples include "If only men were truly religious" or "If only I could fly" (9). Basically, this is (as he admits) the utopian story, and he traces its genesis to (duh) Thomas More's Utopia (1516). In the early sf I study, one can see the Stage Three-B story in tales such as Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), which one could imagine asking, "If only we had a centralized government that provided jobs and credit for everyone and also electric furniture" or William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), which asks "If only we were all art-loving socialists who were kind to our neighbours." (Asimov actually uses Erewhon as an example of Stage Three-B, but I think Erewhonian society is more complicated than that; it has its positives, yes, but it swaps them for some negatives that Victorian British society didn't have.)

Stage Three-C, then, is the dystopian extrapolation, the "this" of "If this goes on--" is a thing the author considers to be bad. Asimov cites (of course) 1984 and Brave New World; in early science fiction, I feel like almost every H. G. Wells story fits into this mold. The Time Machine (1895) is "If this division of the laboring and intellectual classes goes on--" and The War in the Air (1908) is "If this building towards a European conflict along with the development of air-power goes on--" and The Sleeper Awakes (1910) is "If this increased urbanization and stifling of democracy goes on--".

Like all typologies, it has its uses and limits, and Asimov himself makes some goofy statements, such as suggesting that Stage Three science fiction stories are difficult under communism because you might have to admit there's something wrong with communism to pull them off. A previous owner of my copy of MSSF (one Michael Lippman, apparently) underlined this statement: "Modern American science fiction makes virtually no use of the Stage Three-B story, however. Part of the reason is the the bitterness against society is lacking" (10), and then wrote "HAH!" in the margins.

Upon recognizing the "postulates" in the book that I was recently reading, I googled them to see if they had some pre-Asimov roots that I was unaware of. The three gambits of Stage Three are attributed to a lot of different people, or often go completely unattributed. Furthermore, most everyone refers to them as describing all science fiction, not (as Asimov did) a specific subtype of it, sociological extrapolation. Others fail to recognize what each of the gambits actually means; even though you could plug something positive into "If this goes on--", that's not how Asimov actually meant it. Some examples:

• This April 1992 obituary for Asimov in the LA Times gets it mostly right.
• They pop up unattributed (and with the extra "How can this be--") in this quite frankly awful-looking teacher's guide to Lois Lowry's The Giver. The science fiction page looks like someone assembled it in two minutes with Wikipedia, though frankly I think Wikipedia is probably better than this.
• This 2001 ALA guidebook to sf cites them to someone named Betty Rosenberg in the first issue of something called Genreflecting.
• This 2002 interview with Octavia Butler has her call them "an old idea." She calls her Parable books "If this goes on--" stories. She also calls the Parable books that in this 1999 paper, claiming a distinction between that story type and "social prophecy." This 2015 essay about Butler by Tananarive Due (the wife of Steven Barnes, whose novel sent me off on this quest to begin with) claims they are Robert Heinlein's questions. Gerry Canavan's introduction to Green Planets (2014) cites Butler as citing them to Heinlein, so maybe that's where this (mis)attribution begins. Some later writers have just attributed the three questions to Butler herself!
  
• In a 2005 essay, James Gunn says that "What if--" and "If this goes on--" are "conventional wisdom," and that "If only--" is the coinage of Theodore Sturgeon!
• David Brin attributes them to Asimov in this 2012 facebook post, but then uses "What if--" to describe a book that is a clear example of "If only--"!
• In this conversation between Michael Chabon and Neil Gaiman (reprinted in 2015), Gaiman says he "remember[s] reading an essay at some point about classic science fiction" that mentioned them. Gaiman also draws on them here, in an essay about where his ideas come from, though here he uses them less about science fiction, and more about fiction in general. "What if--" is the important one here, and then "If only--" and "If this goes on--" are a couple among many other questions that include "I wonder--" and "Wouldn't it be interesting if--"
• In a 2015 tweet, Arthur Chu gets the utopian/dystopian thing right, but doesn't mention a source for the three gambits.

There's plenty more, but that's the first couple pages of Google results. None of the citations-- not even those to Asimov-- are specific enough to name an actual source, so I feel justified in maintaining my belief that they are an original Asimov coinage, even if they are not necessarily original to the introduction to More Soviet Science Fiction; it seems pretty obscure to be the root of all this. Then again, maybe that's why so many people know Asimov coined it, but not where he did it!

The most consistent citation of a non-Asimov source is Robert Heinlein, and I think that's because he actually wrote a 1940 short novel called If This Goes On--, which seems (from the synopsis) to really be an "If this goes on--" story; I'd imagine it's where Asimov got that particular wording from to begin with!

EDITED TO ADD ON 18 FEB. 2021: The introductions to both SSF and MSSF were reprinted in a 1981 collection of Asimov's nonfiction published by Doubleday, called Asimov on Science Fiction. In his preface to the introductions, Asimov notes, "I came up with some thoughts on the historical development of science fiction that I had not worked out previously" (47), so they are indeed his coinages, and this is indeed where they first appeared.

Review: I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

Mass market paperback, 272 pages
Published 2004 (contents: 1940-50)
Acquired and read September 2009
Reread June 2012

I, Robot
by Isaac Asimov

I taught this book for the second time this summer; I don't think it went as well as it did last time, but I can't really point at a reason for that. My students did cause me to reevaluate the ostensibly triumphal ending of "Robbie" to an extent that I had not done prior. On the other hand, rereading it to teach it has consolidated my belief that "The Evitable Conflict" is one of Asimov's best stories, and indeed, one of the best sf short stories ever published. An underrated inclusion in a book of standouts.

Archival Review: The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov

Mass market paperback, 270 pages
Published 1986 (originally 1956)
Acquired March 2007
Read December 2007

The Naked Sun
by Isaac Asimov

Apparently, I'm on a bit of an Asimov kick these past few months.  Or rather, I was when I acquired all these books last spring.  This isn't one I loaned and lost, though; rather, I never owned it at all for some reason!  Still, I'd borrowed the library's copy several times, so it wasn't unfamiliar.  But acquiring means reading, and so I did.  I enjoyed it as much as ever-- it's a typical Asimov mystery, though not as good as The Caves of Steel.  Asimov gets in some of his best world-building with Solarian civilization, the mystery is fairly decent, and a visit from R. Daneel Olivaw is always a treat, even if Elijah Bailey is rather cruel to him at times.

Archival Review: The Positronic Man by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg

Hardcover, 204 pages
Published 1993
Acquired March 2007
Read December 2007

The Positronic Man
by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg

This is another of those Asimov books I loaned off six years ago and never got back.  Like Nightfall and The Ugly Little Boy, this is Silverberg expanding an Asimov short story into a novel, and this is the most successful of the lot.  Unlike Nightfall, where the extra bits felt extraneous, Silverberg's expansions onto the already-excellent "The Bicentennial Man" just make a good story even better, providing detail where Asimov skimped-- it is, after all, a story that has to cover two centuries!  One of my favorite Asimov stories, and it was even made into a decent Asimov movie.

Archival Review: I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay by Harlan Ellison with Isaac Asimov

Trade paperback, 288 pages
Published 2004 (originally 1974)
Acquired March 2007
Read November 2007

I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay

by Harlan Ellison with Isaac Asimov

This isn't the script of the dreadful Will Smith film from a few years ago, but rather Ellison's 1970s straight adaptation of the Asimov "story-cycle", which never got produced because Ellison doesn't know when it pays to be polite to people.  It's an interesting thought experiment, though-- visually, it would have made a magnificent film, as the gorgeous illustrations show, though it's hard to imagine it satisfactorily being pulled off in the 1970s.  Nowadays, though... 

The adaptation of the chosen short stories is handled quite well-- inserting Calvin into "Robbie" is an obvious but excellent choice; I was surprised but happy to see "Runaround" included, as it's one of the best "Law problem" stories, and the addition of Calvin works; "Liar!" is adapted almost exactly, which makes sense, as it's probably the best Calvin story Asimov ever wrote; and "Lenny" might not actually be in the original book, but its method of inclusion here is inspired.  All in all, it makes for an excellent (and ultimately much more optimistic than Asimov's own) vision of the future of mankind.  The world is clearly not a Asimov one, though, but rather an Ellison one, and though that bothered me at times, it's the nature of adaptations.  If there's any substantial flaw, it's that the frame story is a little too long and involved; not everything that that happens in it is particularly relevant to the story Ellison is trying to tell.  But as for Calvin, Byerley, Powell, Donavan, and the rest, this is the cinematic treatment they deserved.

Archival Review: Norby Through Time and Space by Janet and Isaac Asimov

Mass market paperback, 202 pages
Published 1988 (content: 1986-87)
Acquired March 2007
Read November 2007

Norby Through Time and Space

by Janet and Isaac Asimov

This YA series about Norby, the Mixed-Up Robot, was one of my favorite reads as a child, not to mention my introduction to Isaac Asimov (even if Janet actually did do all the writing). Occasionally, I come upon paperback versions in used bookstores that collect two of them together, and I snatch them up instantly. This one collects Norby and the Queen's Necklace (what I remembered as my favorite) and Norby Finds a Villain.

It's excellent YA literature, with a decent breadth of imagination on display in just these two stories. Jeff and Norby and a variety of other characters find themselves in the near future, pre-Revolutionary France, Roman times, prehistoric times, far-future utopias, far-future dystopias, hyperspace, aberrant future versions of Mars, and dangerous alternate realities just within the confines of these two short tales! Norby himself is as fun as ever, and the supporting cast doesn't disappoint. The Queen's Necklace isn't quite as good as I remember (not all of the temporal shenanigans actually work out in the end), but it's solid fun, as is Finds a Villain.