Skip to main content

The Martian Way (SF) - Isaac Asimov ***

A collection of three novellas and a short story from one of the recognised masters of the 'golden age' of science fiction. These 1950s stories demonstrate well both why this period was given this title back then - the quality was far higher than, say, the 1920s and 30s - and also why that gold has tarnished in quite a big way since. By Asimov standards, the characters here are slightly more three dimensional than usual, but still from the stock cupboard, while women only feature as part of the scenery.

Still, there's some good material. The Martian Way is a bit of a precursor for Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - space colony under pressure from the dominant Earth realises that it has to find a way to be truly independent. In this case, the problem is water and the solution is recognising the wider resources available to those with mastery of space. Youth has some of the feel of a Bradbury story with young protagonists (inevitably both male) - though Asimov can't capture the same sense of wonder. But it's a classic twist-in-the-tale piece of SF, nicely done. The Deep, the short story, tries to look at human culture through alien eyes and half succeeds. And Sucker Bait involves a mission to a failed colony where Asimov does what he does best - tries to find the solution to a problem of maintaining a galactic civilisation, in this case information overload.

The idea of that last story is that people are increasingly specialised and computers don't have insight, so there's a need in a widespread society (across thousands of planets) is to somehow have the ability to cross index and analyse knowledge. Now, of course, we would turn to computers, but we can't blame Asimov for not thinking of the advances we've seen in both software and hardware - so instead he proposes a human solution, individuals programmed from birth to be in the Mnemonic Service - remembering everything they see and able to link together forgotten pieces of information. Human Googles, you might say.

Clearly this isn't a realistic solution, but at least Asimov had thought about the issue. The story still has those 1950s faults. The captain and crew of the ship are straight out of marine central casting and regard the 'egghead' scientists as weirdos. And there's a sentence that beautifully sums up the period approach to women in the description of the origin of the settlement: 'In the next months, some of the unattached men arranged to have women brought in, so the settlement must have flourished for a while.' Yet despite these faults, this is primarily a story of ideas and Asimov was exploring an issue that most tales of galactic empire simply never considered.

I wouldn't say this short book is a collection to rush out and obtain - but if you come across it, it's well worth giving it a try.

 The book is long out of print and isn't currently on Kindle. The cover shown is of my 1974 reprint of the 1965 Panther edition.
Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more