{"id":6749,"date":"2018-06-20T17:29:08","date_gmt":"2018-06-21T00:29:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=6749"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:43:26","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:43:26","slug":"asimov-the-winds-of-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2018\/06\/20\/asimov-the-winds-of-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Asimov: THE WINDS OF CHANGE"},"content":{"rendered":"

THE WINDS OF CHANGE AND OTHER STORIES, published in 1983, is the 11th<\/sup> of 14 collections of SF and fantasy stories from the \u2018main sequence\u2019 of Asimov\u2019s collections: the set of his collections that don\u2019t overlap, that don\u2019t consists of remixes of stories from earlier books, that don\u2019t consist of mystery or other non-fantastic stories, and aren\u2019t small press or limited-edition volumes (which overlap the main sequence in most cases anyway).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>To clarify and stipulate: I\u2019m missing one of the 14, the 1988 volume AZAZEL, fantasy stories about a pocket demon, which is why it\u2019s not shown in the photo here. I\u2019m missing at least one large remix, a 1985 Tor volume called THE EDGE OF TOMORROW. Other remixes are the ones shown flat in the photo. I\u2019m not including the three early FOUNDATION books, since they are commonly thought of as novels (even though their contents were originally published as magazine stories); yet I\u2019m including I, ROBOT, as a story-cycle that\u2019s always been published as a collection.<\/p>\n

As with the collections of Ray Bradbury, the early volumes contain the author\u2019s strongest work, peaking in Asimov\u2019s case with NIGHTFALL AND OTHER STORIES in 1969. The later books, especially THE BICENTENNIAL MAN, have the occasional stand-out story, but for the most part consist of lesser works written on request, often to address a given theme, while Asimov was preoccupied with writing novels or nonfiction books. The final two collections, GOLD and MAGIC, published after Asimov\u2019s death in 1992, are SF and fantasy respectfully, all the stories not already collected; but there were so few of them in the last decade of his life that each book is filled out with a generous allotment of essays.<\/p>\n

The last collection before Asimov\u2019s death in 1992 was this one, THE WINDS OF CHANGE, consisting mostly of stories first published from 1976 to 1982, with two others from the 1950s that for whatever reason were missed in earlier collections. Those two, and a couple three of the later stories, are especially interesting.<\/p>\n

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A few of the lesser ones first, interesting mostly because Asimov provides short introductions to the stories that reveal why they were written, and you can see how Asimov responded to an assigned task. Asked for a story about dependence on computers, he wrote \u201cA Perfect Fit\u201d (1981), about an attempted computer fraudster punished with a psychologically instilled inhibition against using computers, rendering him unable to function in his modern world. It\u2019s essentially a rewrite of Knight\u2019s \u201cThe Country of the Kind\u201d or Silverberg\u2019s \u201cTo See the Invisible Man.\u201d Inspired by his membership in a Gilbert & Sullivan society, Asimov wrote \u201cFair Exchange?\u201d (1978), a time travel paradox story about retrieving the lost music from the early operetta \u201cThespis.\u201d Asked for a story by a fashion magazine (!), Asimov produced \u201cFor the Birds\u201d (1980), in which a fashion designer visits a space station and realizes that exercise in zero-G shouldn\u2019t involve wings, but rather fins like dolphins. Asked for a four-part story for newspaper syndication, Asimov wrote, in 1979, \u201cIt Is Coming,\u201d in which Multivac \u2013 Asimov\u2019s cavern-sized mainframe that runs the world, from his early robot stories \u2013 is summoned to decipher the message from an approaching alien object, with a payoff about contact not between alien races, but between computers.<\/p>\n

Given the title \u201cThe Last Shuttle,\u201d we have a story (1981) about a much-advanced space shuttle, 170 years in the future and operating with anti-grav, ferrying away the last of the entire population of humanity, in order to leave Earth to return to wilderness. Hmm, would that really happen? Asimov can be glib at times and carry you along with persuasive arguments and counterarguments that hide the implausibility of the key premise. In \u201cNothing for Nothing\u201d (1979, inspired by the idea of cave paintings) alien explorers to Earth 15,000 years ago find cave paintings of the era so remarkable they carry out an \u2018exchange,\u2019 in a curious variation of Trek\u2019s prime directive; but really, why is idea of representational art so novel to them? And in \u201cTo Tell at a Glance\u201d (full version original to this book) a tour guide on one of a dozen worlds in Lunar Orbit must detect which of five visitors from other worlds is possibly a saboteur from Earth. The key slip-up depends on the architecture of the worlds \u2013 toroidal space stations \u2013 and what the phrase \u201cthe other side of the world\u201d means in that context. But would someone from Earth, hearing that phrase, automatically look *down*? Really?<\/p>\n

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On to the better, or at least more interesting for one reason or another, stories.<\/p>\n

\u201cBelief\u201d is a 30-page story from 1953 Astounding<\/em>, and concerns Roger Toomey, a physicist who discovers he can literally levitate, as he demonstrates to his wife. He hesitates to reveal his talent to others, because as a physicist he can\u2019t conceive how such a thing could be possible. So what does he do? He writes letters to prominent physicists at other universities, asking for their speculation on how levitation might theoretically work. His own department head learns of these letters and admonishes him. He meets with a psychiatrist for an interesting discussion of what Toomey\u2019s *real* problem is: getting scientists to study something they don\u2019t want to.<\/p>\n

The story ends as Toomey attends a seminar by a fellow physicist who didn\u2019t respond to his letter, and demonstrates levitating before his eyes, forcing him to accept the phenomenon rather that admit he might be insane.<\/p>\n

Now, the story is contrived in that Toomey could have avoided all his troubles by demonstrating his talent to his department head and other associates in the first place. But key to this story is that Asimov mentions, in his intro to the story, that Astounding<\/em> editor John Campbell \u2013 notorious for his interest in the 1950s and \u201860s in various pseudo-scientific phenomena, beginning with Dianetics (later Scientology) \u2013 forced some changes to the story that Asimov didn\u2019t entirely approve of. Hmm. How to get scientists to study something they don\u2019t want to. (Asimov mentions he didn\u2019t have the original ms. of the story to use for this book.) One can see Campbell skewing the story to make that point. Trouble is, as with the Dean Drive and Campbell\u2019s other hobbyhorses, all it takes to interest the scientist is a presentation of unambiguous evidence of a new phenomenon, and that never happens with perpetual motion machines or the like, just as this story is prolonged by the needless withholding of such evidence. There\u2019s not really a problem here.<\/p>\n

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A newer story, from 1976, is \u201cGood Taste\u201d (1976), set on the same orbiting Worlds used in the later story \u201cTo Tell at a Glance,\u201d though with much more flare. Set on Gammer (a corruption of Gamma), the family of Chawker Minor welcomes him back from a year-long \u2018Grand Tour\u2019 of other worlds, a youthful practice tolerated if not approved of. The parents are Elder Chawker and Lady Chawker, the older brother is Chawker Major, and everyone in Gammer lives off \u2018Prime,\u2019 a culture of fungus, which is flavored through elaborate artificial flavors with names like Frisking Lamb, Sour-Mind, and Mountain-Tang. Minor\u2019s older brother Major is quite skilled at this, and intends winning an annual taste competition, but Minor has some ideas of his own as a result of his tour, and enters the Finals against his brother.<\/p>\n

The payoff recalls an Arthur C. Clarke story about artificial foods vs. their real counterparts, but what\u2019s notable here is the amount of inventiveness in the depiction of this in-grown world and how outside worlds are held in disapproval. \u201cElder thinks that all rights and wrongs were written down by the makers of Gammer and that it\u2019s all in a book of which there is only one copy and we have it, so that all the Other Worlds are wrong forever.\u201d There\u2019s more imaginative social speculation in this story than in the entire rest of the book.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIdeas Die Hard\u201d is a 1957 story from Galaxy<\/em> magazine, edited by Horace L. Gold, whom Asimov notes was an \u201cacerbic individual\u201d notorious for cruel rejections; Asimov eventually stopped submitting to him. The set up of the story is that three earlier unmanned probes sent to see the Moon\u2019s far side have failed before reaching it, so now two astronauts are being sent on the latest probe. As they travel Davis, a contrarian, challenges Oldbury for proof that the Earth is really round, that it\u2019s really billions of years old, and so on, or whether any evidence one might cite could have been fabricated somehow. (It recalls the Bradbury story about the astronaut who begins to doubt the existence of reality outside the ship.) Which makes it astonishing that when the probe rounds the Moon the two astronauts see \u2013 scaffolding. The Moon is a fake, a construct. There\u2019s a surprise ending beyond that, that recalls the famous debut episode of Twilight Zone<\/em>. Thus the story never truly addresses the epistemological issue: how do we know what we know, accept or challenge convention truth. The unintentional irony of the story is that it never answers its initial question.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe Last Answer\u201d was written for the 50th<\/sup> anniversary issue of Analog<\/em> (formerly Astounding<\/em>) in 1980, in honor of editor John Campbell and Asimov\u2019s early career there. The title sounds like a cheeky riposte to Asimov\u2019s famous story \u201cThe Last Question,\u201d and both deal with god issues. In this story atheistic physicist Murray Templeton dies of a heart attack and is amazed to find himself still conscious, apparently drawn into \u2018heaven\u2019 and speaking with an entity who might as well be God. This entity describes what it wants from Templeton, and how Templeton will have all eternity to fulfill that purpose. Templeton argues and draws the entity into an admission of what all eternal entities must want. As with so many Asimovian dialogues, it\u2019s persuasive from point to point, but at the end you might suspect you\u2019ve merely been argued into a corner.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe Winds of Change\u201d (1982) is something of stunt, even a tour-de-force, in that except for a few paragraphs at the beginning and a few at the end, it consists of a long monologue by one Jonas Dinsmore, a mediocre college professor, directed at his department chairman and a rival, more talented, professor. Dinsmore knows he\u2019s not liked, but while the three of them sit in a lounge awaiting some forthcoming message, he indulges himself by imagining how he might change things to his own advantage. Not by changing himself, or by changing them, or by changing the science they are all devoted to \u2013 but by changing the world around them. To turn the tables.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, he claims, he\u2019s concocted a means of time travel to make a change in the past to effect such a change in society. He\u2019s researched their pasts and knows their early involvements in free thought movements.<\/p>\n

The story\u2019s not about how he managed time travel; it\u2019s about what possible change he could have made to disadvantage the talent and expertise of his colleagues, their interest in science and free thought.<\/p>\n

(Spoiler!) The message arrives, via agents of the Legion of Decency (!), who first arrest the chairman and rival professor \u201cin the name of God and the Congregation for the crime of deviltry and witchcraft.\u201d And then acknowledges Dinsmore as the new president of the university.<\/p>\n

Dinsmore has his victory. Except that — final line — \u201cIn the grip of the Moral Majority, he must remember, no one was ever truly<\/em> safe.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so scientists become victims of a theocracy. The story reflects Asimov\u2019s concern about movements like the Moral Majority (what the Christian evangelical movement was called at the time), expressed in many of his essays of the time, along with his concern about the various forms of science-denial that plague us today, but have always been present throughout American history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE WINDS OF CHANGE AND OTHER STORIES, published in 1983, is the 11th of 14 collections of SF and fantasy stories from the \u2018main sequence\u2019 of Asimov\u2019s collections: the set of his collections that don\u2019t overlap, that don\u2019t consists of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-notes","category-isaac-asimov"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6749"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6766,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6749\/revisions\/6766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}