panguitch's Full Review: Isaac Asimov - Pebble in the Sky
My favorite line from a Hitchcock film comes from Rebecca, when Laurence Olivier, playing a sophisticated and commanding older man, says to Joan Fontaine's vulnerable ingénue, "I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool!" The absurdity of the era's male-female dynamic is delightfully amusing from today's perspective, and it makes me smile in every Cary Grant movie I see.
But somehow I'm less willing to indulge this dynamic in literature. And unfortunately for the genre, science fiction came of age at a time when it didn't seem so ridiculous to always have middle-aged adventuring scientists sweeping pretty young twenty-year-olds off their feet in the course of saving the human race from interstellar extinction.
Isaac Asimov is particularly guilty and his first published novel, Pebble in the Sky, is an excellent example, with the renowned archaeologist Bel Arvardan paying a visit to a benighted and backwards little planet where he happens to both get caught in a plot to destroy the pan-galactic empire and fall in love with a sweet young local girl. The dirty little world in question happens to be Earth, whose people are less than second class citizens in the empire, although Arvardan's heretical research may just prove Earth is actually the birthplace of humanity.
Now I'm not trying to say that Asimov was the first to tackle these issues, nor that he does so in great depth, (and I acknowledge that Pebble in the Sky is more commonly seen as a commentary on racism given its origin in mid-twentieth century America) but I can't help in reading his stories of the Empire but marvel at how well he anticipated the central concerns of postcolonialism.
Less surprising but equally impressive is the prescience of his science. In this instance he posits biological warfare at a time (1950) when America was secretly spraying its own cities with Anthrax simulant to test the feasibility of such a weapon. Again, Asimov was not first (let's all give a nod to H. G. Wells), but his bioengineered "Radiation Fever" virus is a lot more frightening than swine flu.
He also presents an amusing portrait in his far-future empire of the controversy between those who believe that human life developed independently on multiple planets (a theory of convergent evolution) and those who support theories of a single homeworld. Less impressive but fairly well depicted are the psychic powers obtained by a man who is sent from our present day into this distant future filled with crisis and romance.
That element of the book and all of its associated handwavium never did sit well with me, and the absence of Cary Grant's mug made the patronizing romance harder to swallow. Still, it's a good, pulpy adventure with some prescient ideas, and in another sixty years it may not look any more silly than today's romantic comedies and all of their hip, capable, and neurotic heroines and endearingly incompetent and dorky men.
One moment Joseph Schwartz is a happily retired tailor in Chicago, 1949. The next he s a helpless stranger on Earth during the heyday of the first Gal...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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