On Sep 15, 2008, at 9:32 AM, John Cowan wrote:
Rob Seaman scripsit:
I was referring to the Asimov novel - agoraphobe detective and his
positronic partner.
Yes, I know. I forget in exactly which of his thousand or so essays
Asimov coined the phrase "planetary chauvinism" for the belief that
human civilization (in later uses, life) can only exist on or near
the surfaces of planets, but the term is definitely out there:
415 Google hits, including a Wikipedia article and a 1971 _Time_
magazine essay called "Is There Life On Mars?"
And the missions that actually reached Mars chose clocks based on
Solar time.
Asimov's fiction is firmly located in the so-called hard SF realm of
nuts and bolts and the laws of physics.
Well, unless you count hyperspace travel and subspace communication,
time travel (in _The End Of Eternity_), and a bunch of very clear
fantasy stories written near the end of his life, then I don't think
so.
If anything, the _Heaven Chronicles_ are closer to what is known to be
known: slower-than-light starships, for example.
Physicists speculate about the laws of physics. Why not authors? The
point being that a typical Asimov story was representative of the
"Campbellian" mode of positing some delta universe to our own and
rigorously deducing logical consequences. One doesn't speculate about
technology alone, but rather, its impact on humanity and other
intelligent species.
Niven's FTL spacecraft make voyages to neutron stars and the center of
our Galaxy. But it is the effect of these voyages on Beowulf Shaeffer
that makes the story. That is, the stories of even the nerdiest
practitioners of this nerdiest profession still hinge on characters
and the theatricality of their experience. Not much has changed since
the original Beowulf, other than the media used to tell the stories.
Rob
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