Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition) (41 page)

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Authors: James Gunn

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Once more Asimov is not content simply with the problems of the energy exchange, which Hallam has called ''the road that is downhill both ways." That part does have its central interest, to be sure, with its twists and turns and logical confirmations. In the para-Universe the Electron Pump is called, of course, the Positron Pump: it pumps positrons, not electrons. The facts of the para-Universe that have been the subject of ingenious speculation in Part I are strikingly confirmed in Part II: the small suns, the relatively short lifespan of the para-Universe (the questions raised about how the para-Universe was created and if it was created at the time our Universe was created, why it is still around; or if it was created later, by what mechanism, are avoided by Odeen's comment that time may pass differently in the two Universes), and most of all the alien life-patterns. Creatures of diffuse substance are made possible by the stronger nuclear force, and energy-eaters are more probable where energy is made more easily available by the fusion process. Odeen points out that in their Universe "matter doesn't fly apart" because "the tiny particles do manage to cling together across the space that separates them." Melting is not possible in the other Universe, Odeen says, because the particles spread the wave-forms more and need more room. With the transfer of natural law from the other Universe, melting would slowly become more difficult, but the Universe would long be over before this became noticeable. It is even credible that creatures who feed directly on energy might be more likely to recognize the existence of an alternate Universe and be able to transfer material to it. Moreover, the para-people have the motivation to initiate the exchange: their own imminent starvation and racial death.
These details must have delighted Asimov the "click-click as unexpected pieces fall into place, as annoying anomalies become anomalous no more" especially the attributes of the Hard Ones. The Hard Ones are most rational and are mostly concerned with the mind and their inquiries into the Universe, not only because they are the result of a process guided by a Rational but because they are more dense. Rationals are more dense than Parentals, who are more dense than Emotionals; thus Emotionals rarely are capable of thought, Parentals are capable of thought only about family matters, and Rationals devote most of their time to abstract thinking. In the para-Universe, to be dense is to be intellectual. (This does not work out completely; Dua, intellectual though she is, has "retained a girlishly rarefied structure.") Thus when Dua merges with the cavern wall and becomes more dense, she can 
understand many things, including the language of the Hard Ones: they use air vibrations instead of the energy exchange or telepathic communication of the Soft Ones.
All of this, however, including Dua's concern about the people in the other Universe, which leads to the sending of the messages (a consequence, perhaps, of her seldom-used Emotional attributes), is reinforced by the main narrative structure, of which the relationship between the Universes is a subordinate part. The main structure concerns the triad and the working out of its problems: Tritt's desire for an Emotional and then a baby Emotional; Odeen's attempt to keep the triad harmonious, his pleasure with Dua, and his greater love for Tritt; and mostly Dua's difference and her desire to understand her situation and to avoid producing a baby Emotional and passing on. In addition to the narrative conflicts, the reader enjoys the science-fictional delight of the working out of the alien tripartite life form.
Moreover, Part II has a plentiful supply of Asimov's favorite fictional device: the mystery. Several mysteries demand solutions. Who are the Hard Ones, and why do they never talk about themselves? Why do they teach the Rationals, and what is their relation to the Soft Ones? What happens to Soft Ones when they pass on? Who is Estwald, and why does he never appear? Other intriguing questions are raised to be answered by the events of the story.
Beyond this are the philosophical and psychological comments implied by the narrative, and the style in which the narrative is presented. In Part I Asimov drew upon his experience to describe the nature of scientists and the process of science. In Part II he drew upon his experience with people on a more intimate level to describe the relationships between the sexes, even if there are three of them. The tripartite nature of the Soft Ones, who eventually combine into one mature Hard One, allowed Asimov to deal with the multiple facets of human psychology.
A psychologist might suspect that Asimov's Emotional, Parental, and Rational represent Freud's Id, Superego, and Ego. Elizabeth Anne Hull, in an article published in
Extrapolation
(Summer 1981), analyzed the novel, including Parts I and III, according to Eric Berne's transactional analysis, and its "child," "parent," and "adult." Asimov denied that he knew anything about transactional analysis or Freud, and added, a bit disingenuously perhaps (for he made his fortune out of rendering obscure material comprehensible), that he probably would not have understood them if he did.
No one need accept Asimov's statements about himself as absolute 
truth. In the afterword to Olander and Greenberg's
Asimov,
for example, Asimov first built a case for his not having incorporated in his fiction any of the psychological and artistic aspects the essays discovered in his work because he wrote too fast and did not have the special knowledge necessary. He then admitted that the parallels discovered by others might have been in his unconscious. His customary posture about literary criticism, and often psychological analysis as well, was to deny conscious intent. In 1950, however, he sat, unannounced, in a classroom in which his story "Nightfall" was analyzed, then introduced himself afterward with the comment that the analysis was all wrong. The professor (Gotthard Guenther) replied, "What makes you think, just because you are the author of `Nightfall,' that you have the slightest inkling of what is in it?" After that, Asimov was willing to admit that his subconscious might have slipped things into his story that he did not consciously intend.
In
The Gods Themselves,
however, Asimov was not so much dealing with the parts of human psychology as with the nature of men and women. He wrote that he was convinced at an early age that women were puzzling creatures of mystery and, though he learned about them as he matured, he could not shake his early attitude.
Thus Part I of
The Gods Themselves
has no women characters, and Part III has a woman in an important role (and significantly, in terms of sexual differences, as an "Intuitionist") but working as a tour guide.
Part II, however, is focused on Dua, for whom Asimov used the pronoun "she." Tritt and Odeen are referred to as "he." It is the Emotional who is necessary for sex, who has the power to say "yes" or "no." Most Emotionals are foolish, silly, empty-headed creatures, who are concerned mostly with coquettishness, gossip, and basking in the sun; they are even described as gluttonous. They like the company of other Emotionals: Odeen reflects that ''the Rational had his teacher . . . and the Parental his children but the Emotional had all the other Emotionals." Odeen finds them incomprehensible. "Who could tell what any Emotional thought?" he asks himself. "They were so different they made left and right seem alike in everything but mind."
In the Rational, Asimov surely identified himself, the rational man, who loves to learn and to teach and who is puzzled by the irrationality of the people around him, by the stubborn parental drives that have created the most serious problem facing the world, and most of all by those emotional responses to situations that cannot be reached by reason. In the novel, Rationals have little understanding of emotional matters. Odeen reflects that "there was almost a perverse pride among 
Rationals in their relative poverty of perception. Such perception wasn't a thing of the mind; it was most characteristic of Emotionals. Odeen was a Rational of Rationals, proud of reasoning rather than feeling. . . ." Rationals are embarrassed by experiencing emotions. Odeen, for instance, when he first meets Tritt feels embarrassed by an inner warmth and the feeling that there was something Tritt wanted that was utterly divorced from thought.
Rationals are not without flaws. Asimov portrayed them as unable to imagine the agony of an Earth destroyed by a nova, or even, in their lack of empathy, being unable to conceive of the humanity of an alien. The final melting of the triad into a Hard One may not be so much the uniting of the parts of the psyche but the blending of flawed humans into a unified whole person combining male and female attributes, as well as jointly shared parental instincts, into one rational being.
The Parentals are less easy to assign sex. Asimov calls them "he," and Dua calls her Parental "Daddy." It would be too easy to assign them female roles; in any case, such an assignment rings false. Perhaps the Parental is an amalgam of the male and female impulses to procreation and family building. Asimov himself, according to the evidence of his autobiography, was a concerned and devoted father. The characteristics displayed by Tritt seem relatively unappealing; he is stubborn and uncaring about anything except his own satisfaction; to be sure, his satisfaction is essential to the continuance of the species, which otherwise might well have died out long ago. In the para-Universe, with its falling birthrate, this instinctive behavior seems essential, and Asimov grants it its necessary place.
Finally, Dua, the focus of Part II, is different from other Emotionals. As a female, Dua is concerned with rationality. She finds Odeen more fascinating, much more interesting than Tritt, and her fellow Emotionals are hopeless. "Dua was so non-Emotional an Emotional!" Odeen thinks. She is curious, she wants to find out why things are as they are, and she enjoys having Odeen teach her as much as Odeen enjoys teaching her. Odeen is pleased that she is different, pleased that she wants to share his intellectual life, and pleased that he is pleased. Without going too far into an analysis of Asimov's personal life, one might speculate that he was comparing his first wife and her lack of interest in his work with his second wife (a physician, a psychiatrist, and after their marriage a novelist as well) and her ability to share his interests and intellectual life.
These attitudes may not endear Asimov to feminists. But if Part II has a human message as well as a novelistic one, it may be in support of the 
feminist position that traditional sex roles should not keep men from expressing their emotions or women from areas of life traditionally considered closed to them by biology or character.
Asimov always insisted that he had no style as a writer, that all he wanted to do was to write clearly. Joe Patrouch (in his 1974 book,
The Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov
) pointed out, accurately, that simple sentences and clear statements are in themselves a style. At times Asimov allowed himself to criticize writers who seemed to value style over content. His famous categorization of science fiction into periods ending with style-dominance scarcely concealed a note of disappointment; he valued the sociology-dominant period into which most of his own work fell.
The first two parts of
The Gods Themselves
seem unusually style-conscious for Asimov. The sentences are straightforward, and, except for the scientific explanations, the vocabulary is unadorned. A sense of place is no more evident than ever (and less so than in
The Caves of Steel
and
The Naked Sun
) even the alien landscape, often the colorful foreground of science fiction, is described simply as rocks and caverns. But the conscious arrangement of narrative elements and the way in which Asimov shares this artfulness with the reader is clearly a matter of style. Part I starts with section 6 and then flashes back to pick up the beginnings of the plutonium-186 story. In Part II, Asimov echoes the tripartite nature of the aliens by dividing the narration into segments labeled "a" for those in which Dua is the viewpoint character, "b" in which it is Odeen, and ''c" in which it is Tritt, with numbers to designate the progressing sections as "1a," "1b," "1c," "2a," and so forth. In their individual narratives, Dua, Odeen, and Tritt recall the parts of the story that are appropriate to each Dua, the parting with her Parental; Odeen, the meeting with Tritt; Tritt, the asking for an Emotional who turned out to be Dua and each subsection moves the basic story forward as well. The logical progression falters only after "6b," at which point it skips Tritt's narrative segment (all three view-points are represented at the end of "6b," as the melting into the Hard One occurs) and moves directly to "7abc," in which Estwald steps forward. This is fully as stylist a device as any cast up by the New Wave.
Part III is neither as involving nor as intriguing as Parts I and II. Perhaps it succumbs to Gunn's Law, which asserts that science-fiction novels tend to fall apart at the end. Asimov confronted the novelistic imperative to wind up the threads laid out with such care in the first two parts. But the winding-up process is seldom as exciting as the laying-out, and Asimov has an entire third of the novel devoted to it.
Part III is titled ". . . Contend in Vain?" with the question mark added to provide a suggestion of hope that is ultimately justified by the resolution. The scene is Earth's Universe about a year after Lamont tried to convince Senator Burt that the Pump should be stopped. The narrative is straightforward. Two people traveling on the same vessel arrive on the moon with a group of tourists. One is described only as a middle-aged tourist. The other is Konrad Gottstein, Commissioner-Appointee to the Moon. He was formerly on the staff of Senator Burt and had been assigned an investigation of the Electron Pump for waste and personal profit-taking. The middle-aged tourist makes friends with the Lunarite tour guide Selene, pronounced SELL-uh-nee (Asimov often made a point of how his characters' names were pronounced Gla-DI-a and Da-RI-us come to mind), and arouses her interest by asking to see the Earth-controlled proton synchrotron.
Selene is the sexual partner of Lunarite physicist Barron Neville, who is engaged in research later revealed as involved with creating an Electron Pump, or something like it, on the Moon. The Moon has no Electron Pump because the para-Universe will not accept tungsten made available there. Neville hopes to be able to learn enough to initiate an exchange from Earth's Universe rather than depending upon the para-people to do it. He also believes that Earth is conspiring to keep the Electron Pump from the Moon. He asks Selene to see the middle-aged tourist again, to play up to his growing romantic interest in her, and to find out what he is doing on the Moon and why he is interested in the proton synchrotron.
Later, after Selene has shown the middle-aged tourist something of life in the man-made tunnels of the Moon (there is some resemblance here to the caverns of the para-world) and reported on their conversations to Neville, Gottstein confronts the middle-aged tourist with knowledge of his identity: he is Benjamin Allan Denison, the once-promising radiochemist whose challenge to Hallam (described in Part I) resulted in Hallam's stubborn pursuit of the plutonium-tungsten exchange, the development of the Electron Pump, and Denison's fall from science into male cosmetics as a result of Hallam's enmity. Denison rose to a vice-presidency, which he has given up to immigrate to the Moon, where he hopes to reestablish himself as a physicist.
Gottstein remembers him as a scientist who came to Burt's committee with the theory that Lamont later developed independently. Gottstein obtains Denison's agreement to keep him informed about anything he might discover in his dealings with the Moon scientists. The departing 
Commissioner has warned Gottstein that something might be going on that needed watching.

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