{"id":896,"date":"2017-03-22T20:18:16","date_gmt":"2017-03-23T00:18:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=896"},"modified":"2017-06-13T18:26:56","modified_gmt":"2017-06-13T22:26:56","slug":"more-anti-asimov-ranting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2017\/03\/22\/more-anti-asimov-ranting\/","title":{"rendered":"More Anti-Asimov Ranting"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, in my last post about Asimov<\/a> I decried his descent into collectivist propaganda (Foundation\u2019s Edge).<\/p>\n

I will continue my diatribe here and show how Asimov devolved from an anthropocentric viewpoint to a proponent of the hive mind.<\/p>\n

In 1950 Asimov had a short story called Misbegotten Missionary. \u00a0\u00a0In the story an exploratory mission from Earth visits a world named Saybrook\u2019s Planet that is populated by communal creatures.\u00a0 Although these creatures take on all the forms needed to make up an ecosystem (microbes, plants and animals) they are all part of one consciousness.\u00a0 In addition, any one of these creatures has the ability to alter all creatures around it so that all their offspring will be communal creatures too.\u00a0 The explorers took precautions to protect their ship from contamination by any biological contact.\u00a0 But unbeknownst to them a solitary creature has stowed away on the ship and is waiting to reach Earth to begin the conversion process.\u00a0 It somehow realizes that the earth creatures monitor bacteria and the mice that they have on board to detect contamination by an alien life form.\u00a0 Because of this the creature refrains from altering any of the ship\u2019s life forms to avoid tipping off the crew.\u00a0 The creature is cryptic and disguises itself as a piece of wire in an electrical circuit on the ship.\u00a0 By the kind of remarkable luck that only happens in fiction (or the 2016 presidential election) the wire that the creature is connected to is in the circuit to open the ship door.\u00a0 So instead of converting earth to communalism he gets fried like a death row inmate in Florida.\u00a0 The conclusion has the crew discover the bullet they dodged and everyone breaths a sigh of relief.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Apparently, Asimov was unhappy with this result.\u00a0 So, 32 years later he corrected this mistake in the Foundation sequel, Foundation\u2019s Edge.\u00a0 Searching for a mysterious unseen hand in the Foundation universe he follows clues that lead to Sayshell (not Saybrook\u2019s Planet) where he learns of the existence of Gaia, a communal intelligence that not only is composed of all the living things on the planet but also the inanimate components too.\u00a0 Now of course, this reeks of James Lovelock\u2019s trendy 1970\u2019s theory, The Gaia Hypothesis, that Earth was one big super-organism that had become infected with the human virus (thus the Matrix, thus Al Gore).\u00a0 Apparently, Asimov had bought into this theory and saw a harmonization (read Borgian assimilation) of humanity by the communal organism as the perfect solution.\u00a0 And just to make sure no one thinks assimilation is soul extinguishing oblivion, he shows us a human component of the collective who is a cheerful woman who happens to like the protagonist.\u00a0 So, you see, if you glue a smiley face onto the Borg it\u2019s all good.\u00a0 And just to make sure no connection to Saybrook\u2019s Planet is possible, the protagonist in Foundation\u2019s Edge is not forced into the hive but gets to choose whether humanity is melted into a collective consciousness with igneous rocks and hydrogen atoms.\u00a0 You see it\u2019s totally okay!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Asimov displays all the symptoms of the proto-sjw that he was.\u00a0 He dislikes individualism.\u00a0 He admires the hive.\u00a0 He desires to remove choice from the currently free.\u00a0 And he dislikes all this random doing what you want to do (except probably for himself of course).\u00a0 And finally to hammer home the lesson that humans can\u2019t be left to their own devices we find out that Earth is a radioactive corpse and the whole Gaia situation is a master plan put together by a super-intelligent robot to try to save humans from themselves.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So my question is, what the hell happened to this doofus?\u00a0 And of course, the answer is he just followed the same trajectory as most of the progressives from the thirties who admired the Soviet Union before the Cold War.\u00a0 Now, Heinlein started out in that camp too.\u00a0 But when he changed wives and married a conservative he changed course and rejected the hive.\u00a0 I remember in his novel Methusaleh\u2019s Children Heinlein has a world where a race exists that also possesses a collective mind.\u00a0 And the humans also had to make a choice.\u00a0 If they remained they would be assimilated.\u00a0 Only those who feared death remained. \u00a0Obviously, these collective races are the communists.\u00a0 Heinlein rejected it.\u00a0 Asimov finally embraced it, much to his detriment as a writer and a man.\u00a0 But it did finally earn him a Hugo.\u00a0 So apparently the Hugo had also made the transition by that time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, in my last post about Asimov I decried his descent into collectivist propaganda (Foundation\u2019s Edge). 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