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

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more