bartl
08-13-2009, 10:49 AM
As long as Grant mentioned Isaac Asimov's novel, Pebble in the Sky...
I read it first in 1974, several years after I had read most of Asimov's other novels and short story collections. From the point of view of Asimov's novels, notably when he combined his Robot series with his Foundation series (Pebble in the Sky properly being a prequel to the Foundation stories), an interesting point comes up.
A popular button that, at least at one time, was sold at Science Fiction Conventions read, "The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth. The Rest of Us Will Have the Stars." Or something very similar. And this, to me, was what Asimov had in mind when he wrote Pebble in the Sky; that the bold, the daring, the intelligent, had all gone to the stars, and those who were left were the descendants of those who did not have the need to progress or evolve, but were happy to sit around until they became extinct.
A few years later, Asimov started writing his Elijah Bailey novels, which had a slightly different point of view; that the early pioneers into space used a form of eugenics, blocking anybody who did not share their genetic characteristics from joining them (somehow, by the time of the Foundation novels, genetic variation had set in again).
My guess (and it remains a guess, as he is no longer alive to confirm or deny it) was that he saw Earth as post-WWII Europe, and the rest of space as the United States. In 1950, when he wrote Pebble in the Sky, he saw the United States as taking the best of other nations, particularly Europe, and thereby, simply by existing, drained part of the life out of the older nations. By The Caves of Steel, a couple of years later, near the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement in the United States, he realized that the arbitrary, "race"-based bigotry of the United States, being harmful in the long run.
In other words, PEBBLE IN THE SKY is not so much of a dystopic story as it is seeing a humanity that had outgrown their native planet, and those who refused to grow, and were left to stagnate in their own waste.
I read it first in 1974, several years after I had read most of Asimov's other novels and short story collections. From the point of view of Asimov's novels, notably when he combined his Robot series with his Foundation series (Pebble in the Sky properly being a prequel to the Foundation stories), an interesting point comes up.
A popular button that, at least at one time, was sold at Science Fiction Conventions read, "The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth. The Rest of Us Will Have the Stars." Or something very similar. And this, to me, was what Asimov had in mind when he wrote Pebble in the Sky; that the bold, the daring, the intelligent, had all gone to the stars, and those who were left were the descendants of those who did not have the need to progress or evolve, but were happy to sit around until they became extinct.
A few years later, Asimov started writing his Elijah Bailey novels, which had a slightly different point of view; that the early pioneers into space used a form of eugenics, blocking anybody who did not share their genetic characteristics from joining them (somehow, by the time of the Foundation novels, genetic variation had set in again).
My guess (and it remains a guess, as he is no longer alive to confirm or deny it) was that he saw Earth as post-WWII Europe, and the rest of space as the United States. In 1950, when he wrote Pebble in the Sky, he saw the United States as taking the best of other nations, particularly Europe, and thereby, simply by existing, drained part of the life out of the older nations. By The Caves of Steel, a couple of years later, near the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement in the United States, he realized that the arbitrary, "race"-based bigotry of the United States, being harmful in the long run.
In other words, PEBBLE IN THE SKY is not so much of a dystopic story as it is seeing a humanity that had outgrown their native planet, and those who refused to grow, and were left to stagnate in their own waste.