G. Gordon Liddy, Watergate Mastermind, Dead at 90

Liddy, a former FBI agent and Army veteran, was convicted of conspiracy, burglary and illegal wiretapping for his role in the Watergate burglary.

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Europe After the Rain: Dada and Surrealism

 

documentary film (1978)

Book Review

Earth Is Room Enough

by Isaac Asimov

     Isaac Asimov wrote a vast number of short stories that varied in quality. Earth Is Room Enough is a collection of them from the 1950s. That particular decade was a time when the possibilities of space travel captured the public’s attention so science-fiction writers catered to that interest with a vast output of writing regarding that subject. Asimov, however, was never the kind of guy who tried to keep up with all the hacks and sometimes went his own way by also writing stories that take place here on Earth. Some of these are collected in this short volume. While the location of all of them is our current home planet, there really is not one dominant theme that strings them all together.

The first story, titled “The Dead Past”, is the longest and best of the bunch. A historian hears about an invention that makes it possible to watch the past the way we watch television. He wants to observe the ancient city of Carthage to prove his theory that the Carthaginians did not practice child sacrifice; he believed that the accounts written about this were actually fictional propaganda meant to make the Roman citizens turn against the Carthaginians. (Was this an ancient version of Qanon?) When he contacts the company that owns this technology he only gets turned away. He finds a scientist who agrees to build this machine but they become suspicious that the government is involved in a cover up operation to keep this technology a secret. “The Dead Past” is not so much of a conspiracy theory story as it is a re-examination of the Frankenstein’s Monster complex where technology ends up harming its creators more than it helps them.

“Kid’s Stuff” is another interesting story. An author of pulp fantasy stories is working when a large insect-like creature appears on his desk. Despite its appearance, it claims to be an elf from Avalon then proceeds to dominate the mind and actions of the author. The elf’s plan is to enslave the author and take him to Avalon in order to teach the fairies there how to build a technological society. The author is unwilling to resist the telepathic domination of the elf but his son comes to the rescue at the end. Of course, the story ends with a happy resolution and a nice, neat explanation as to what actually happened, just as we would expect. Asimov did at times explore some radical themes but here we get a good example of how he often stuck to a conventional formula for story-telling.

The third most memorable story is “Dreaming Is a Private Thing”. A technology has been invented in which its user wears a helmet that transplants dreams into their heads, kind of like virtual reality. Since most people have dull imaginations, they hire professional dreamers to create dreams to be transmitted to others through the device. The elderly executive of the most successful dream company is under various kinds of pressure to keep the business at the top. Competitive market forces, new technological innovations, and government intrusions all threaten the company’s stability. On top of it all, his most talented dream-maker wants to quit in order to have a more ordinary life. While the technology sounds interesting, it is actually a gimmicky vehicle that Asimov uses to carry a statement about the need for quality over quantity. The director’s dilemma is whether or not he should sacrifice the quality of their product to stay competitive in the marketplace or not. An intelligent reader should have no trouble guessing what decision is made in the end.

The rest of the stories are somewhat interesting. There is the usual stuff about robots, a couple supernatural fantasies, a story that illustrates the multiverse hypothesis in quantum mechanics, and then there are some short stories that are more like jokes than works of literature. Jokes do not age well and the ones in this collection are just as corny as the ones your grandfather would tell when you were a little kid.

Overall this book is good for a one-time read. The ideas and insights are interesting but Isaac Asimov does a better job with the same themes in other works. Some of these stories could have been expanded and written with more depth but the author was a busy man and obviously had other priorities. Earth Is Room Enough is a collection of odds and ends that don’t really congeal into a unified whole the way I Robot does. But if you manage to pick up an old paperback imprint in nice condition, it is worth going over once as a light diversion.

Asimov, Isaac. Earth Is Room Enough. Fawcett Crest, New York: 1957.

 

Book Review

The Martian Way and Other Stories

by Isaac Asimov

     Isaac Asimov was a master of the science-fiction short story. The Martian Way and Other Stories is a collection of four of them, all about life on other planets that make statements about human nature and our perceptions of reality. While they may not be his most famous tales, or even some of his better ones, they are still good and this collection is a worthwhile way to spend your time reading.

The titular piece, “The Martian Way”, tells the story of some astronauts from Mars, the main characters being Swenson, Long and Rioz. Their job is to salvage abandoned hulls from rockets launched from Earth, and repurposing them for use where they live. Their home is in the future when Mars has been colonized without being entirely self-sufficient. Their main problem is a water shortage and this valuable commodity must be shipped from Earth for their survival. The political problem is that on Earth a populist demagogue is running for public office and he is whipping up a storm of anger by saying that Earth is running out of water and the people on Mars no longer deserve it because they are stealing the space junk left floating in the universe by astronauts who abandoned it. Swemson, Long , and Rioz hatch a plan to make a dangerous trip to Saturn in order to haul a chunk of ice from its rings so that they no longer need help from Earth to sustain their colony.

“The Martian Way” is a simple, problem-solving space opera that relies heavily on description and action to move the plot along. While it has a basic crisis/resolution plot and structure, it is the sensation and imagery that fill in the sparse outline and make it complete. The descriptions of spacewalking and the space ship’s approach to Saturn and its rings are vivid and clear. But in the end, it is really just a heroes’ journey type narrative, the kind that Hollywood movies have been recycling for the past century.

“The Martian Way’ is the least pedantic of the four stories. “Youth”, the second story, is more moral in its intent. Two young boys are keeping two smaller creatures in a cage; they plan on showing them off at the circus. Meanwhile their fathers are waiting to have a business meeting with two men from another planet who have arrived in peace, searching for resources to take back home. So it is easy to see where this is going already. But that shouldn’t detract from the story too much because Asimov lays out the pieces of this narrative puzzle in a way that makes the complete picture come together gradually with a fair amount of suspense. It is a very structured and logical story.

I won’t give away the ending here but I will say that this story was the weakest one in this collection. The ending did not work well primarily because as a reader I formed a mental picture of all the characters at the beginning of the story but at the end I learned that my mental picture was wrong. So Asimov doesn’t pull this gimmicky ending off well but, then again, you could say it is a case of the journey being more important than the destination. If this story had been made as a film, or even an episode of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, some simple cinematic tricks could have been utilized to get around the limits of the narration but as a piece of writing it just doesn’t work right in the end.

In “The Deep”, a mother is traveling in an airplane with her infant son. During the flight, a being from another planet invades the baby’s body for an exploratory mission in search of knowledge regarding human nature and the type of planet that Earth really is. While possessing the child’s mind, the alien being finds human consciousness to be both primitive and impossible to fully comprehend. The human ego poses an obstacle to its comprehension and even things like the climate and terrain of Earth are off-putting to this alien. While this being has a low opinion of humans, the point is not that it is really so superior; in fact, this being might be suffering from hubris. In its own way, it is the same as humans who think of themselves as being superior to all other life forms. The reality of the situation is that these two contrasting types of creatures have both adapted to their environments in their own respective ways. Asimov, in this story, is posing a question regarding evolutionary biology and human consciousness. Just because the alien and the human have adapted to their environments in different ways, does that really mean that one type of creature is superior to the other? Is the concept of natural hierarchy simply an illusion? Asimov was a progressive thinker, an anti-racist and a vegetarian, so you might be able to deduce where he is going with this.

The final story, “Sucker Bait”, is really the strongest of the four. A group of scientists, all specialists in a variety of fields, are sent to a distant planet to find out why a colony of humans died out there. The central character is Mark Annuncio who is described as a Mnemonist, a special breed of humans who are able to memorize infinite amounts of information with complete accuracy. This socially awkward character has one advantage over computers and that is the capacity for intuition. He also contrasts with the other specialists because, on one hand, they understand their respective areas of specialization, and, on the other, are completely ignorant about any other fields of knowledge. Mark Annuncio does not understand anything he memorizes but he is able to make intuitive leaps across categories that specialists are not able to comprehend. Mark Annuncio is necessary because he is able to solve problems that computers can not since such machines only respond to programmed stimuli and are unable to actually think. Each character has their own place in the bigger scheme but most of them suffer from tunnel-vision so that they can not comprehend how everything fits together. This is the nature of human intelligence and a commentary on the benefits of intellectual diversity.

Curiously enough, the humans of ordinary intelligence in this story all carry pocket-sized portable computers to help them solve problems. So Asimov, in the 1950s, appears to have predicted the invention of smart phones and the internet. What really makes this interesting, though, is Mark Annuncio’s comment that these computers are only used by stupid people who can’t think for themselves. Therefore, Asimov also appears to have predicted a dilemma of the 21^st century; people use the internet to do their thinking for them and unfortunately this often means being tricked or deceived into believing in garbage like conspiracy theories, pseudo-science, intolerant extremism and all the other kinds of junk that seems to thrive and breed like bacteria in the online world. At its least offensive, the mediocre masses of humanity spend most of their social media time posting pictures of cats or what they ate for lunch. When will humanity be saved from itself?

As the story unfolds, Mark Annuncio comes into conflict with the other scientists after they land on the designated planet. In the end, the trouble he causes turns out to be an act of heroism. Once again, we are left with a happy, Hollywood movie-type ending.

Isaac Asimov was prolific and wrote tons of stories. Given the volume of his output, it would be absurd to say that all his writings are of equal literary merit. The Martian way and Other Stories does not reach the complexity or heights of grandeur that he accomplished in works like I, Robot. These certainly are not his worst stories either. For a writer whose worst stories are better than most authors’ best stories, it can be said that this collection is, at the very least, an enjoyable and thought-provoking read,

Asimov, Isaac. The Martian Way and Other Stories. Fawcett Crest Books, Greenwich, CT: 1969.