Posted on 07/20/2004 9:43:06 AM PDT by jalisco555
Isaac Asimov was the steak-and-buffet restaurant of American authors: What he lacked in quality, he made up for in volume. If you didn't like what he was serving, you could wait a few minutes for him to bring out something else. By the time he died in 1992, at the age of 72, Asimov had published more than 470 books, ranging from science-fiction classics to annotated guides of great literature to limerick collections to The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, a defense and celebration of lechery. "His first 100 books took him 237 months, or almost 20 years, until October 1969, to write," his New York Times obituary observed. "His second 100, a milestone he reached in March 1979, took 113 months, or about 9 ½ years—a rate of more than 10 books a year. His third 100 took only 69 months, until December 1984, or less than 6 years." By the end, Asimov achieved the Grand Slam of book writing, turning out at least one volume for each of the 10 classifications in the Dewey Decimal System.
The thread that connected this prodigious output was Asimov's role as a teacher, "the greatest explainer of the age," as Carl Sagan called him. Whether the subject was science, Shakespeare, or the Bible, Asimov was a popularizer who wrote with clarity and concision. Even in his science fiction, the work for which he will be most remembered, Asimov was as much an explainer as a storyteller, an advocate for science and reason over mysticism. In fact, the rap on Asimov the fiction writer is that his stories are too simple, too obvious, too easy to be the stuff of great literature. In Wired, the science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow recently described Asimov's work as "proto-fiction … from a time before the field shed its gills and developed lungs, feet, and believable characters." True. But if Asimov is so easy, why do so many people—including Alex Proyas, the director of I, Robot, and the movie's screenwriters, Akiva Goldsman and Jeff Vintar—keep getting him so wrong?
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.msn.com ...
There's a "Have Spacesuit" in the works now. I don't think "Red Planet" would fly - the Martians probably seem too silly now. "Tunnel in the Sky" might make a good movie - actually that would be a good SciFi channel miniseries fodder, if they wouldn't screw it up.
What I'd really love is a nice adaption of "The Rolling Stones".
well, see, I haven't seen the movie and have mostly avoided the reviews, but I got the IMPRESSION that a robot was a murderer, which would, of course, violate the firt law.
But obviously that's not the case or not quite the case; anyway don't tell me more...I'll see it this week.
Anyway, they couldn't very well make a movie of I Robot which was a collection of short stories.
Actually, Asimov's own stories are the best evidence that the three laws cannot actually be implemented. In the last Foundation books, written under the influence of a Freudian therapist wife, it becomes clear that one of the early robots has gone rouge and twisted a thousand years of human history "for the good of" humankind. The bot was essentially a marxist.
Hey, I resemble that remark.
I think a lot of the "real Heinlein" actually did get into "Starship Troopers". The powered suits business was just a mcguffin, not essential to plot or message.
Te production design and presentation of the message itself was deliberately over the top - like the propaganda video, etc. His political speculation - suffrage earned by military service, etc. - was also something of a mcguffin. But it basically got through, as much as it could.
Compare it to what Heinlein used as his model - WWII in the Pacific. The movie is much like a WWII movie of the period, including the propaganda. "Starship Troopers" is a WWII novel.
I didn't know there was a movie version of Nightfall.
You know he extended that story into a book and I really liked the book also.
trust me... There is a gray area.
I didn't know it had been extended into a book. I remember reading the story as part of an anthology, and it struck me as almost Bradburyesque in its choice of subjects and in its style.
"Considering what was done to "Starship Troopers" I shudder to think about it. And let's not even mention the movie version of "Nightfall"."
Do you mean Asimov's classic short story "Nightfall" was made into a movie. In theory, I can imagine that story making a really good sci-fi movie, but they always seem to shoot for the lowest common denominator (the mass audience) for whom any kind of real sci-fi is just too complicated. Then again, people ate up the Matrix, but I thought it was a confusing mish-mash of philosophy which would only seem really interesting philosophically to someone who had never been exposed to even an introductory course on the subject.
Holywood gets a lot of things wrong because film is different from novel. They have no more luck with Asimov than they do with King than they do with Faulkner.
The trouble with "good" SciFi is that the technology has to enable the tale, not become the tale. But today's Holywood is so intent on getting the special effects right that the combination of effects and technology becomes the tale itself. That's where the original Star Wars movie went right, and most of the rest of them went wrong.
To be fair, I, Robot was not a story, it was a collection of short stories. If they wanted to do an Asimov robot movie, they should have done The Caves of Steel or something.
I should note that I haven't seen I, Robot, but if the reviews are correct, they didn't help with "That d*** Frankenstein Complex" that Asimov hated so much.
Shalom.
The Gaia introduced in Foundation's Edge was a deliberate man-made construction, whose true purpose (a bulwark against potential extra-galactic intelligences) remained to be explained in later books.
"His Fundamental Laws of Robotics have always struck me as assinine, impractical, and unlikely to ever be implemented. "
They were never meant to be practical or implemented. They were just a literary device, much like the Galactic empire. I've always enjoyed Asimov's science fiction - it has a unique flavour.
Let's put it this way. The movie starred David Birney who was in the TV shows "Bridget Loves Bernie" and "St. Elsewhere". My most striking memory of the film was a scene where Birney's character stabs someone else to death with a spear in a fight over a woman. For some reason I don't remember that scene from Asimov's story.
Let me add in a plug for one of my favorite bad movie review sites here:
http://www.jabootu.com/acolytes/bnotes/nightfall.htm
They weren't too pleased about Nightfall either.
Agreed.
I decided that when I see the movie I won't even attempt to relate it to any Asimov stories.
I always tell people who ask about the Foundation Tilogy to never ever read the books that followed. Not only was it poor writing, it totally undid the story line of the Foundation Tilogy.
It was even more annoying than the dream season on Dallas.
Those books were pretty disappointing but they were works of Shakespearean brilliance compared to the so-called Second Foundation Trilogy, which was a series of books written by Greg Benford, Greg Bear and David Brin. Absolutely atrocious. I forced myself to read them because I couldn't believe that three such normally good writers could write so badly but I finally gave up part-way through the third book (Brin's contribution).
perhaps my objections to the 3Laws are more due to the way dipwads in the real world discuss them as if they are the "way to do things" in real cybernetics, rather than their usage in the various Asimov Robot stories.
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