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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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