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literary power that is required for that sort of thing. I can deal with rational action, but I'm not sure that I can deal with the inner recesses of being." Asimov restricted himself almost entirely to the problem-solving story, though his variations often end with the identification of a problem rather than its solution, as in "The Dead Past" or "Profession." To identify the problem, according to the logic of Asimov's fiction and perhaps his personal beliefs, was to perceive its solution, or to perceive that it was incapable of solution and must be lived with, as in "Nightfall.'' But even in "Nightfall," it is better to know, for with knowledge comes some kind of reward, even triumph. |
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"The Ugly Little Boy" is different. It is the story of a character whose problem cannot be solved. With the resolution of the situation comes not triumph or acceptance but a personal statement, ineffectual and even tragic though it may be. Edith Fellowes, a nurse hired to tend a Neanderthal boy brought from the past to the high-energy laboratory of Stasis, Inc., to be studied, begins her job with skepticism and cold efficiency. Gradually, she becomes attached to the Neanderthal boy whom she calls Timmie. When he must be returned to his past, she cannot prevail upon her coldly scientific Supervisors to let him stay it is impossible and she recognizes it so she returns with the now seven-year-old boy to his own time. It is a solution that solves nothing. Miss Fellowes will have not much more chance of surviving in the Pleistocene than Timmie himself, perhaps not as much. Her return with him will comfort her a bit for a short time. Reason tells the reader that their life will be, in Thomas Hobbes's words, "poor, nasty, brutish, and short" but not, for the moment at least, "solitary." As a consequence, the resolution seems sentimental and un-Asimovian. The reason many readers like the story "People say that they've read [it] and it made them cry at the end, and I answer that I am pleased because it made me cry when I wrote it," Asimov has said is the reason it is not as effective as science fiction. The action Miss Fellowes takes is irrational, and it can be accepted only if we assume that it is better for her to die comforting Timmie in the Pleistocene than to survive to lead a lonely and unrewarding life in the present, grieving over Timmie's tragic fate. |
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Of Asimov's favorite stories, two of them dealt with the triumph of sentiment over rationality, what I call his "un-Asimovian" stories. That may represent an inconsistency in Asimov's character or a yearning toward a kind of writing that he felt himself incapable of, or even was incapable of adopting as a rational approach to life. Ironically, two of the three short stories that Robert Silverberg expanded into novels in the 1990s, with Asimov's approval and assistance, were those stories. |
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