Disposable Lit Reviews

Bantam Spectra, 1991
339 pp.
ISBN 0-553-29099-1

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Isaac Asimov was the first major science fiction writer to “franchise” himself. He first lent his name to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in the ’70’s, and actually took a semi-active role in establishing its editorial policies. Then, in the ’80’s, his name appeared in large letters on some multi-volume novel series taking place in his long-running “robot” milieu (Isaac Asimov’s Robot City was the first), each written by a young up-and-comer who may have had a following in the magazines, but little footing in getting novels published and noticed. On the one hand, it looked like a commercial cop-out; on the other, it did help get some exposure for the next generation, those who had grown up on the Good Doctor’s work, in a decade when brand names were becoming more and more important in every industry, including publishing.

Then, in 1990, things turned another corner when Asimov and Robert Silverberg (about half a generation younger than Asimov, and only one rank below him in popularity) collaborated on Nightfall, a full-length novel based on Asimov’s most famous short story (and, by many accounts, the most popular science fiction short story ever).

In case you’ve never read the original “Nightfall,” well, I’m about to spoil it for you. (I’m guessing it’s probably the second-most spoiled short story in the world, right after Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” — EVERYONE knows how it ends before they read it.) A humanish society has arisen on a planet with six suns, at least one of which is in the sky at all times, so the concept of “night” is alien to them. But once every two millennia, the suns all come into conjunction, and every spot in the world gets twelve hours of darkness — and a glimpse at the stars. And between the unthinkable darkness and the sudden awareness of exactly how much bigger the universe is than they ever thought, everyone goes crazy and sets the cities aflame in order to fight off the darkness. The end.

It’s really much better than that. I don’t know if it’s the best science fiction story ever written (I’ve got my own candidates for that — ask me about ‘em sometime), but it’s a very solid little hook, such a nifty little idea that, from all accounts, the story practically wrote itself. (The initial idea wasn’t even Asimov’s. John W. Campbell, his editor and mentor at Astounding Stories, gave him a quote from Emerson — “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!” — and basically asked, “What do you think?”) It’s also a tight little narrative, all of it taking place practically in realtime in the observatory as the scientists watch night fall; it almost wants to be a one-act place. (Not a good one, mind you; the most striking moments would be represented by actors pointing off-stage and saying, “Look there! The eclipse is starting! And look over there — the city’s on fire!”)

So. Almost fifty years after “Nightfall” was first published comes the full-length novel version. It is, obviously, a lot longer than the original short story. But I can’t say that it’s really any better.

Had I not known any better, I’d have assumed the entire thing to have been written by Dr. Asimov. His prose style is remarkably unremarkable, by which I mean that fills its function precisely while calling no attention to itself with artistic flourishes. (Asimov once spoke of his writing style as a clear pane of glass designed to show the world on the other side transparently, as opposed to stained glass which distracts from the view.) If Bob Silverberg effectively ghostwrote the novel, he absorbed the elder statesman’s style perfectly.

By that same token, though, almost all of the deficiencies of the original short story are maintained here at greater length. In the original, they were forgiveable mainly due to the medium — short stories have to take a great many expected shortcuts in order to stay, well, short; but here, the reappearance of those same shortcuts on a greater scale feels more like a lack of creative ambition.

It’s not so much an expansion or adaptation of the original as a novel-length framework surrounding the original, which is dropped into the book practically verbatim after about a hundred and fifty pages. Everything previous to that point is simply the expansion of all of the exposition in the short story, with larger parts for all the characters involved, most of whom are scientists: The psychologist studying the effects of darkness on the human psyche, the archaeologist discovering a bizarre series of successive destructions by fire at two-thousand-year intervals, the astronomer noticing a slight permutation in the orbits of the suns that doesn’t jibe with the Theory of Universal Gravitation, the elder astronomer who first came up with the Theory and now wants to find the wildcard that’s thrown his computations out of whack. Plus, for a little variety, there’s also the journalist who usually likes to promote the scientists’ discoveries for the general public, but who becomes their harshest critic when the cross-disciplinary conclusions of the scientists listed above point to a coming eclipse, one with the potential to throw the world into utter darkness.

And then we’ve got the religionists — the Apostles of the Flame, apocalyptic fanatics who predict a coming cataclysm which just happens to match up with the date the scientists project for the eclipse.

If the society described above doesn’t sound terribly alien… well, you’re right. What we’ve got here is humans, not just in a very human society, but in a distinctly Western 20th- or 21st-century society; it makes the Star Trek idea of a “normal” alien society seem positively enlightened. It’s a society of cars, grad students, amusement parks, and high-class pubs. You may hope that the idea of a continuously-lit planet would have interesting repercussions in human psychology (would anyone sleep?) and society. No luck; Asimov and Silverberg cheat. The six suns somehow just happen to cycle through the sky in such a way that there’s a distinct, regular cycle of lighter and darker periods (you know them as “day” and “night”). Even there, any opportunity for honest speculation or alienness is squandered. (I kept waiting for the big reveal that these humans were from earth in the first place. But no.) In this way, I suppose, this was a perfect project for Silverberg, as his novels have often concentrated on humans in a novel situation, without any crumbtrail showing how society got into that situation; one might say his fiction is usually speculative without being terribly extrapolative. (HooWEEE, lissen to the boy sling them big words!)

Some more visible sign of Silverberg’s influence would have been welcome in the treatment of religion here, because this is a deeply anti-religious novel. “Religion,” of course, is presented here as a single monolithic anti-intellectual movement. The Apostles are the only religious people to be found, and they’re presented as slobbering deity-crazed goobers who hate all science and preach only their apocalypse. Contemptuous asides by other characters indicate that these reactionaries want a return to piety and chastity; that’s about all we know of what they stand for, and it’s naturally dismissed as being beneath rational consideration. Not surprising; Dr. Asimov was one of those folks who tend to speak of (and judge) “religion” as a homogenous lump, which makes about as much sense as treating “government” or “architecture” or “language” or any other analogous term as a description, instead of a label for an entire category of human endeavor. Bob Silverberg, at least, had a ’60’s-vintage respect for the idea of spirituality, but none of that comes through here.

The only surprising part, for those who know the short story, is that the novel goes past the conclusion of the short story for over a hundred pages. Yet there, cut adrift from the plot outline of the short story, there’s really nowhere to go. Each character takes a long separate walk through the aftermath, noting and bemoaning the complete collapse of civilization in the panic. Then there’s the petty warlording, the threat of a takeover by the Apostles, and an ending that smells more like the fulfillment of a contractual obligation than the culmination of a storyline.

Frankly, I don’t know how to account for all of this. Asimov and Silverberg are famous in the field for good reason. I guess that even two such seasoned veterans can fall prey to the biggest pitfall of franchised fiction, i.e., the assumption that someone else is contributing the creativity.

Nathan Shumate