Discussing Isaac Asimov's non-fiction a bit yesterday reminded me of my absolute favorite panel at Worldcon, Saturday's "Mundane or Transcendent?" with Cory Doctorow, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Charlie Stross, and Robert Silverberg as moderator. They're all really smart people, and they're all good at turning phrases on the fly, so it was terrifically entertaining.
Some of the best stuff on the panel involved Cory Doctorow talking about Isaac Asimov's fiction, and putting it in a very different light. He argued that Foundation is really a story about the New Deal, and that the Laws of Robotics are actually nerd wish-fullfilment.
The first came out of the obligatory mention of Heinlein, when Doctorow noted that people always talk about Heinlein's politics, but that Asimov's writing was in some ways just as informed by his own political sentiments. He said that Asimov grew up with the New Deal, and always applied that sort of approach. The Foundation books, he said, take a very New Deal approach to the future: the way to deal with humanity's problems is to get the best and brightest together in a room, have them devise a plan for the next three thousand years, and launch a gigantic government project to guide us all to a bright new tomorrow.
(Of course, there's a political subtext to the robot stuff, too, what with there being only one company allowed to make robots, even umpteen centuries into the future. You can imagine what Doctorow thinks of that IP regime...)
I'm not sure how seriously I really take these (or how seriously Doctorow takes them), but I thought both of those points (which I've paraphrased rather heavily) were pretty amusing, but also had an element of truth to them. Of course, it's been years and years since I read any Asimov, but I might take another look, with this in mind. In my copious free time.
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I am fairly sure Asimov wrote of his own fiction that his laws of robotics were nerd wish fulfillment.
Also, if anyone is an expert on nerd wish fulfillment, it would be Cory Doctorow.
The Foundation series was, at some level, a political manifesto. I mean, the first book is a paean to industrial policy and mercantalism. It is also still a lot of fun to read (I reread them a couple of years ago).
Enh. I'm not sure if I'd claim that the Foundation Series was a manifesto, per se, or that I'd consider Asimov to be a particularly political writer. On the other hand, Asimov was a seriously smart man-- most seriously smart men have some kind of opinions on politics and government even if they aren't dominated by them, and I can't see how it's possible to write fiction for a living and not inject some of that into your fiction.
And recall that Asimov is the guy who, when asked where he got the idea for the dystopian "Caves of Steel," responded, in effect, "Dystopia? What dystopia?" Asimov always struck me as the sort who, honestly, just wanted peace and quiet and for everything to be just handled so he could go off and think interesting thoughts.
I don't think he was one-note or absurdist about it-- Fastolfe's daughter wasn't too keen on the idea, as I recall, and he made a big deal of the Spacer culture as being an evolutionary dead end-- but I think is sympathies were always in the "just handle it and leave me alone crowd." Elijah Bailey, after all, tried to force himself to enjoy the bustle, but was effectively an agoraphobic, from what I can recall-- he just wanted tranquility and order.
So, I think I have an idea where Asimov's political leanings were-- and they lean away from mine-- but he struck me as honest and smart and fair enough not to be grating about it. Sort of like Tolkien.