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mass audience. Aside from the few dozen terms describing future technology, most of which are quickly explained, his vocabulary is simple and familiar, even trite. His sentences are relatively uncomplicated and generally cast in the active voice, resulting in a breathless, but not staccato, narrative pace. His language is relatively full of imagery and analogies, making the most unfamiliar science fictional conventions immediately accessible. The apparent impersonality of his style, a common feature of much science fiction, is modified by a serious, earnest, and optimistic tone which is characteristic of Asimov's fiction. (. . .) |
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As a writer of science fiction as well as a scientist, Asimov is also concerned with communicating the missionary gospel of progress to a non-scientific and non-science-fictional audience beyond the science fiction community. To this end, I believe, not merely because such a tour de force was a challenge to the craftsman in him, Asimov attempted (in The Caves of Steel) to amalgamate the detective story with the science fiction novel. In addition, the combination of reservations about over-reliance on scientism with the optimistic anticipation of perfect communication and man-machine progress, while it may well represent the author's personal sense of balance between the sciences and the humanities, also seems calculated as a message of caution to the zealous prophets of science, and as an attempt to show both the masses and the literati that science fiction isn't quite as wild and radical as they may believe. |
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David N. Samuelson, Visions of Tomorrow: Six Journeys from Outer to Inner Space (New York: Arno Press, 1974), pp. 15758, 161 |
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What is "Nightfall" about, and where does its compelling power lie? In his essay "Social Science Fiction" Asimov distinguishes between two kinds of fictional reactions to the French and Industrial revolutions: "Social fiction is that branch of literature which moralizes about a current society through the device of dealing with a fictitious society,'' and "science fiction is that branch of literature which deals with a fictitious society, differing from our own chiefly in the nature or extent of its technological development." In the context of the essay it is clear that Asimov views social fiction as presenting an alternate society with the intent of criticizing contemporary society, whereas science fiction creates an alternate society for its own sake, to show us that things could |
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