Episode: 4400
Title: HPR4400: Isaac Asimov: Other Asimov Novels of Interest
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4400/hpr4400.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:15:43

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4400 for Friday the 13th of June 2025.
Today's show is entitled, Isaac Esemov, Other Esemov Novels of Interest.
It is part of the series science fiction and fantasy.
It is hosted by Ahukar, and is about 15 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, a look at three standalone novels from Esemov.
Hello, this is Ahukar, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in our science fiction and fantasy.
And what I want to do this time is to basically wrap up the discussion of Esemov.
He's one of the three major writers of what is called the Golden Age of Science
Fiction, and we've spent some time looking at his work.
But I'm going to wrap it up with this one, and then we'll move on to some other writers
and other kinds of science fiction and things.
So Asemov wrote a lot of novels that we've already discussed that were all brought together
in this giant foundation slash robots universe.
You know, he tied in the foundation series and the robot series with the novel Robots
and Empire and made it all one big thing.
And we've seen in the later foundation novels that the character of Ardennial Oliva continues
throughout the series.
So that's great, but he wrote a few things outside of all of that.
And some of it are, I think, pretty interesting now.
Now we're really only looking at the novels for adults here, okay?
Now there's a juvenile series called Lucky Star.
It's nothing special, and there are other authors who have done better juvenile novels
to be very frank.
That was not Asemov's strong suit.
You know, if you're looking for someone who wrote really excellent juvenile novels, the
master of that was Robert Heinlein, as far as the golden age is concerned, but what I
want to do is take a look at three of Asemov's adult novels outside of the series.
Now in foundation's edge, there is a hint that ties this novel end of eternity into the
foundation universe.
But you know, nothing in this novel supports that.
And you know, I think we can very easily just kind of skip that and treat it as a standalone
novel.
It sometimes novelists have a bad habit late in life of trying to mess around with their
own backstory.
So the protagonist of End of Eternity is a fellow named Andrew Harlan, and he's a member
of an organization called Eternity that exists outside of time and can travel up when and
down when, in devices called kettles, and when they arrive, reenter time.
They do this in order to police what happens and to promote human happiness by making small
actions that cause what they call reality changes.
But there are limits to where eternity can go.
They cannot access anything prior to the 27th century, which is when the temporal field
that supports eternity was created.
And there are so-called hidden centuries that they cannot access.
Now Andrew Harlan is sent to the 480 second century on a mission, and falls in love with
someone there, a lady named Nois Lambend.
When he realizes that the reality change will affect her century, he breaks the rules
of eternity to take her out of her century and hide her within eternity, taking her to
the empty sections of eternity that exist within the hidden centuries.
Meanwhile, he is also teaching a new person, Brinsley Sheridan Cooper, all about the primitive
times, ie everything from our day through the 27th century.
He's been given this task because he's something of a nerd about all of that old history,
but eventually starts to suspect that there is a reason for this assignment.
He researches the temporal mathematics behind eternity, and starts to suspect that the
inventor of the temporal field had to have had help from the future.
This is confirmed by the management of eternity, and it becomes clear that Cooper is learning
about primitive times, because they are sending him back to become the person who events
the temporal field, thus keeping the circle intact.
Harlan is starting to be a bit suspect to the management, so they lock the controls
of the kettle used to send Cooper back in time, but Harlan breaks the controls and sends
Cooper back to the 20th century instead of the 27th.
But when eternity continues to exist, management decides that all is not lost and send Harlan
to rescue him and bring him to the correct time, and he agrees, but only if he can bring
noise with him.
When they get there, he finds the crucial clue, an advertisement in a pulp magazine that
contains a mushroom cloud, but the magazine was published several years before the first
atomic bomb, so it has to come from Cooper.
Just as in a side, mushroom clouds are not things that only happen with nuclear explosions.
Any large explosion will do it, it's just that nuclear explosions tend to be large.
But you can get enough TNT together, you can get a mushroom cloud as well, but aside
from that, so he sees that clue, then Harlan confronts noise and says she had to come
from the hidden centuries, and she admits to that, and then tells him that they had developed
a different time travel technology, one which allowed them to see different futures.
They found that in many of those futures, the human race went on to colonize the galaxy,
but in every one where eternity arose, the race eventually died out never leaving Earth.
By tweaking reality to make everyone happier, eternity had sapped the vigor of humanity.
They decided it is better not to rescue Cooper, and in that moment, eternity disappears.
Now, you can see a distinct thematic relationship here with the idea of the spacers in the robots
series, whose reliance on robots to give them comfort also sapped them of vigor.
I think this is a really fun novel, and worth a look.
Now the next one is the gods themselves, and this was Asimov's first original work
of fiction in 15 years, published in 1972, because in 1957, with the Sputnik, he stopped
writing fiction, and devoted himself entirely to writing factual science.
We had to turn out engineers and scientists, and regain the lead over those russkes and
all of that.
During that period, he did write the novelization for the movie Fantastic Voyage, no sense in
talking about that.
I mean, he just took their story and novelized it.
In any event, his return to fiction in 1972 was welcomed, and this novel won both the
Nebula Award and a Hugo Award.
Now the difference between them is that Nebula Awards are voted on by writers, and the
Hugo's are voted on by fans, but both are considered prestigious in the science fiction community.
There's very interesting novel in three parts, each of which was first published as a story
in a science fiction magazine before they were collected as a novel.
Part one is set on the earth, and is entitled Against Stupidity.
A scientist develops what comes to be called the pump, which exchanges tungsten 186 for
plutonium 186 in a swap with a parallel universe.
This yields a great deal of power.
Then about 25 years later, another scientist figures out that the initiative for this
exchange actually came from the parallel universe and invites a linguist to join him.
They then inscribed symbols on strips of tungsten 186 and develop a method of communication
across these universes.
Meanwhile, they work out that the process used by the pump is changing the strong nuclear
force in the sun, making it likely to explode, and making the corresponding sun in the
parallel universe grow colder and dimmer.
They cannot get anyone to believe them, though.
Kind of like how difficult it is at first to get people to believe global warning.
That is changing, but it's still struggle sometimes.
So they beg the people in the parallel universe to stop, but it turns out they have been
conversing with dissidents there who cannot stop it, and they beg the earth people to stop.
Part two is set in the parallel universe and is entitled to gods themselves, and it may
be the most creative storytelling, as Amath has ever done.
First the physical laws of this universe are different from ours, and because this section
is from the viewpoint of the natives of this universe, they take for granted things that
would make us go, huh?
Next, the inhabitants of this parallel universe, or at least the ones we're dealing with in
this novel, have three sexes, and each chapter in this section has three subsections.
And each from the viewpoint of a character within a triad, which is their equivalent
of a married couple.
As Amath later pointed out that some people had criticized him for writing novels that
contained virtually no sex, and this section of the novel, he really goes at it.
Only it's weird alien sex.
I would say that the entire novel is worth reading just for this section, to see how
a master can handle truly alien topics.
Part three is set in the moon, back in our universe, and is entitled to contend in vain.
Some other people have worked out what the pump is doing to our son.
Lunar society has diverged from earth society in interesting ways, and they continue researching
the pump and discover a third universe that is in a pre-big bang stage, which they call
the cosmic egg, or cosmic, for short.
It is exactly the opposite properties to that of the triad universe, and they work out
a way to balance things between the three universes so that disasters avoid it.
Now, if you put the titles of these three sections together, you get a quote from Friedrich
Schiller, against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.
And as a matter of several places, as I said, that this novel was his favorite of all of
his novels and his best writing, and I'm going to agree with that.
I think it is fantastic, if you've never read it, you really owe it to yourself.
Now the last one is a novel called Nemesis.
This is loosely tied to the foundation universe by a reference in the novel Forward the Foundation
by Harry Seldon, about a 20,000 year old story.
The background of the story does not need anything from the foundation universe, however.
It is known that over the millions of years of the Solar System's history, the Orte-Cloud
periodically gets disturbed, and comets rain down.
One hypothesized cause of this has been called Nemesis, a dim companion.
In this novel, it is a red dwarf star that is simply passing by, but it has given the
name Nemesis due to the theory on comet disturbances, and it definitely has the potential to
destabilize the Solar System.
A recently discovered technology provides advanced propulsion at a significant fraction of light
speed.
So a space colony was moved to the system where it took up a position around the moon
of a gas giant, which is a planet like Jupiter, that was orbiting the star.
The moon was called Errithro, due to the red light illuminating it.
To eventually discover that the bacterial life on this moon is actually a giant organism
capable of telepathy, which is reminiscent in some ways of Gaia from the foundation universe.
This presents them with a problem, since this is the first other star system Earth people
have visited.
Should they colonize Errithro?
Or instead look to the asteroid belts of the Nemesis system.
But then another breakthrough on Earth develops faster than light drives, and now the whole
galaxy is open to colonization.
Now, I would say this is an average Asimov novel, but that means it's pretty good, because
you know, average for Asimov is better than 90% of the people out there.
And with this, we have concluded our look at the worlds of Isaac Asimov, the first of
the big three of the Golden Age.
I think what I want to do next is take a look at Arthur C. Clarke, and some of his classics.
So this is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio, signing off, and is always encouraging you
to support free software.
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