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(not should or ought to) be different, to accustom us to change. Elsewhere he distinguishes between science fiction and what he calls tomorrow fiction, in which the writer simply tries to show what life will actually be like in a few years. The point in both distinctions is that science fiction must present an alternate society for its own sake rather than comment on contemporary society or attempt to show accurately where we are going.
"Nightfall" presents an alternate society for its own sake. It obviously is not an attempt to show what life will be like a few years from now, so it is not tomorrow fiction. And though it contains a few satirical touches directed at commonly held contemporary assumptionsfor example, Beenay's notion that life as we know it could not exist on a planet revolving about a single sunstill it does not attempt to make us feel in our guts that air pollution is evil or that violent hoodlums have a right to their own identities. "Nightfall" is not social fiction. (. . .)
"Nightfall" has the powerful effect it does because it convinces us that that's the way we would be under those different circumstances. "Nightfall" embodies a cosmic conception: what we are and the way we think are determined by the accident of the environment into which we are born. It figures forth an alternate world and society for its own sake. But that world is not totally irrelevant to our own. It has lessons for us, too. Consciousness, regardless of the environment that shapes it, is sacred. The people of Lagash are our brothers. When they are destroyed, we are destroyed, because we share consciousness. John Donne wrote, ''No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent . . .. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind." "Nightfall" expresses the same sentiments, only on a universal rather than a planetary scale. The sacredness and dignity of life is the message of Donne's Seventeenth Meditation, Asimov's "Nightfall," and science fiction.
Joseph F. Patrouch, Jr., The Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974), pp. 2729
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Charles Elkins
What Asimov accepted as the "underlying concept" of the Foundation trilogy is the vulgar, mechanical, debased version of Marxism promulgated in the Thirtiesand still accepted by many today. Indeed he takes this brand of Marxism to its logical end; human actions and the history they create become as predictable as physical events in

 
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