Discussing Isaac Asimov’s non-fiction a bit yesterday reminded me of my absolute favorite panel at Worldcon, Saturday’s “Mundane or Transcendent?” with Cory Doctorow, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Charlie Stross, and Robert Silverberg as moderator. They’re all really smart people, and they’re all good at turning phrases on the fly, so it was terrifically entertaining.
Some of the best stuff on the panel involved Cory Doctorow talking about Isaac Asimov’s fiction, and putting it in a very different light. He argued that Foundation is really a story about the New Deal, and that the Laws of Robotics are actually nerd wish-fullfilment.
The first came out of the obligatory mention of Heinlein, when Doctorow noted that people always talk about Heinlein’s politics, but that Asimov’s writing was in some ways just as informed by his own political sentiments. He said that Asimov grew up with the New Deal, and always applied that sort of approach. The Foundation books, he said, take a very New Deal approach to the future: the way to deal with humanity’s problems is to get the best and brightest together in a room, have them devise a plan for the next three thousand years, and launch a gigantic government project to guide us all to a bright new tomorrow.
(Of course, there’s a political subtext to the robot stuff, too, what with there being only one company allowed to make robots, even umpteen centuries into the future. You can imagine what Doctorow thinks of that IP regime…)
I’m not sure how seriously I really take these (or how seriously Doctorow takes them), but I thought both of those points (which I’ve paraphrased rather heavily) were pretty amusing, but also had an element of truth to them. Of course, it’s been years and years since I read any Asimov, but I might take another look, with this in mind. In my copious free time.