Quote of the Day

[edenfalling]

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore.
---Ralph Waldo Emerson


...

You know, Isaac Asimov wrote a story about that. It's called Nightfall. And 'adoration' is not quite the right word for the characters' reaction to the stars.

It's a very interesting story -- so much so that Asimov later expanded it into a book, with the help of Robert Silverberg.

Comments

[bewize.livejournal.com]

I loved the book, although I cannot remember the name of it off the top of my head. The world with three suns, where they still used "night lights" because darkness was the single thing to fear.

Asimov was an amazing writer - his stuff was always so much deeper than I wanted to believe at first. Like his Foundation series.

[edenfalling]

The book is helpfully also called Nightfall. *grin* IIRC, he and Silverberg did the story-to-novel treatment on The Ugly Little Boy and The Bicentennial Man as well. All three of the original stories worked well on their own, but the ideas had enough depth to support and justify the novelizations. (They changed the title on the last book, though, to The Positronic Man. And then Robin Williams butchered the movie. *sigh*)

Anyway, I love Asimov. Sometimes his dialogue is clunky and his plotting a bit mechanical, but he's always entertaining and generally thought-provoking as well.

Also, he's the patron saint of clarity. I never get lost in his stories -- I always know who's speaking, what's happening, and why it matters. He uses just enough description to keep readers oriented, just enough indirect characterization to keep people differentiated, and just enough science to make things both interesting and comprehensible. And he does this so smoothly that many people never notice how hard it really is!