20131207.0800

I mentioned in a passing bit of verse not long ago that I attended a company party.*  While there, I had a nice discussion with a colleague who happens to be married to an employee of the company hosting the party, one touching on Asimov.  As a couple of recent posts attest, I have had the works of the Good Doctor on the mind, so the conversation resonated with me--the more so because it spoke to criticism of writing, which is the very thing I do.  And so I return to the notion, offering commentary about the man's works directly, rather than addressing uses of them or criticizing the way in which I have done so.

There are certainly criticism that can be levied against Asimov's work, even the best-known parts of that work: the Robot and Foundation novels, which take place in the same continuum.  The writing very much shows its age in depictions of technology and of race and gender relations, as well as in tying events to years which have since passed without those events occurring.**  And it is the case that those who value hard sf for its unflinching commitment to respect the laws of physics as best understood at the time of writing (for we cannot fault a person for not knowing what has not yet been realized) can turn away from Asimov with some justification.  The positronic brain, hyperdrive, gravitic ships, and various other devices that pervade his books across the two dozen millennia of their internal chronology seem to defy explanation within the laws of reality as we have them, and he glosses over their workings almost entirely.

Even so, there is much of value in the Good Doctor's work.  Perhaps most notable is the concept of the Three Laws of Robotics, which gives the English language the word "robotics" and which, as is discussed elsewhere, is still a touchstone for those actually working in robotics.  But there are other concepts worth noting, as well.  One, as I have noted in many of my earlier blog posts, is voiced in "Sucker Bait": the danger in overspecialization.  There is always the peril of myopia in narrow focus; the concentration on a single thing that allows for new work to be done with that thing teds to exclude other concerns, not seldom to the detriment of those so focused.  It accounts, I think, for the phenomena that undergird the stereotype of the absent-minded professor.  It accounts also, I think, for a number of the problems seen in the administration of the planet; people focus narrowly on the vanishingly small parts of creation that are their selves, neglecting the interconnections among us all, but considering those connections reveals much and is the principal means through which ethical principles of mutuality are advanced.  (There are admittedly some who argue against the validity of mutuality as desirable, but they are relatively few.  Far more common are those who nominally espouse mutuality but act in ways contrary to it because of the greater ease of doing so.)

Another valuable point in Asimov's work is that it is well reasoned.  What he writes values the practiced and disciplined mind working rigorously through information, sorting it, and arriving at conclusions that, if not always expected, are fortunate and more than fortunate.  There is little of the deus ex machina in the main Asimovian corpus (and that little is developed over the space of several books and across millennia within the milieu) and much more of applied reason, bespeaking a fundamental trust that the human mind can engage with the universe successfully.  And that is very much worth keeping in mind.

*Yes, the poem is autobiographical.  Much of what appears in this webspace is.

**This is a problem in other science fiction milieus.  See, for example, the Eugenics Wars in the Star Trek universe.