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child. "Stars all the Stars we didn't know at all. We didn't know anything. We thought six stars in a universe is something the Stars didn't notice is Darkness forever and ever and ever and the walls are breaking in and we didn't know we couldn't know and anything"
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Someone clawed at the torch, and it fell and snuffed out. In the instant, the awful splendor of the indifferent Stars leaped nearer to them. . . .
Only the thought of the three hundred possible survivors tucked away from all the madness in the Hideout and representing a possible break with the terrible consequences of ignorance, remains to sustain the reader.
Asimov's own three favorite short stories that he considered better than "Nightfall" were "The Last Question" (1956), "The Bicentennial Man" (1976), and "The Ugly Little Boy'' (1958). (There may be others.) All were written much later than "Nightfall," with greater craft and in more skillful prose. Readers still may have reasons to prefer "Nightfall." "The Last Question," for instance, deals with a subject even larger than "Nightfall" the death and creation of the universe but it contains virtually no characters. Readers may marvel at its cleverness but are unlikely to be moved by it. "The Bicentennial Man" and "The Ugly Little Boy" are Asimovian anomalies. They are sentimental stories of character in which people change rather than solve puzzles (although there is some puzzle-solving in "The Bicentennial Man"). Their implications are personal rather than species-wide; they deal with individuals rather than civilizations or humanity itself.
Before "Nightfall," Asimov's stories, with a few exceptions, had been imitative and relatively undistinguished. He says as much (in The Early Asimov) when he describes "Half-Breed" (Astounding, February 1940), in which he placed an intelligent race on Mars, one that was sufficiently like Earthmen to make interbreeding possible. "I just accepted science fictional clichés. Eventually I stopped doing that." This, of course, is how most writers begin. They are directed toward writing by a love of reading and they re-create what they love. Eventually, if they have talent, they find their own subjects and their own ways of dealing with them.
Asimov's first published story, "Marooned Off Vesta," interestingly enough, held at its heart the Asimovian subject the rational mind presented with problems by the universe, by accident, or sometimes by the irrational elements in humanity and the Asimovian method: the characters are faced with a puzzle or a mystery and work toward a solution. In the story, a spaceship accident maroons a group of survivors three hundred miles from the asteroid Vesta, where help is available.

 
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