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fiction mystery novels that came so naturally just before he switched to writing non-fiction, The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. |
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I made these suggestions to Asimov, and he agreed that they seemed right. "Certainly the stories that really satisfied me and made me feel good about my writing were my robot stories, and the robot stories, of course, virtually every one of them, had a situation in which a robot which couldn't go wrong did go wrong. And we had to find out what had gone wrong, how to correct it, within the absolute limits of the three laws. This was just the sort of thing I loved to do." |
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At its most typical, in "Nightfall" for example, Asimov's science fiction demonstrates the triumph of reason, or the struggle of reason to triumph, over various kinds of circumstances including irrational or emotional responses to situations. If reason is going to prove superior as an approach to life, the mystery is the natural form in which that superiority will be demonstrated. |
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Asimov has said that his villains generally are as rational as his heroes. "In other words, it's not even a triumph of rationality over irrationality or over emotion, at least not in my favorite stories. It's generally a conflict between rationalities and the superior winning. If it were a western, where everything depends upon the draw of the gun, it would be very unsatisfactory if the hero shot down a person who didn't know how to shoot." |
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Growing up as he did, excelling at intellectual pursuits but uneasy in personal relationships in which he found himself ignorant of the proper thing to do or uncertain how the other person would respond, Asimov found himself coping in a variety of ways. One way, which he adopted when he was young, was to distance himself from the rest of the world with wit: to the end he delighted in puns and wordplay, which found their most typical expression in personal banter with his friends but also enlivened his limericks and verse parodies and displayed themselves in the titles of and occasional lines in articles and stories. Another way to cope was to demonstrate his greater knowledge or superior mind. His adoption of these two characteristics gave him a reputation as a smart-aleck and a know-it-all with a mission to enlighten everyone around him. |
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Asimov gave as an example of his behavior the assignment of Leigh Hunt's "Abou Ben Adhem" in his high-school English class. Anticipating the teacher's question about the last line ("And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest"), his hand shot up, and he answered the inevitable question, "Why did Ben Adhem's name lead all the rest?" with Alpha- |
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