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one: the relationship of people to the universe. This was to become the most significant theme Campbellian science fiction would explore. It asked: What is humanity? How does humanity understand itself and its situation? What can humanity do about it? |
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The story's second element, the reversal of situation, was another Campbell favorite. On the planet where "Nightfall" takes place, the situation is almost the reverse of the situation on Earth. Lagash experiences eternal day rather than the alternation of day and night. How this affects people's behavior becomes the subject of "Nightfall." |
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The third element was a clear-cut test of scientific investigation as opposed to other routes to "knowledge." Emerson's poetic vision was just the starting place. "Nightfall" begins with the Emerson quotation as an epigraph. The answer to Campbell's question ''why should the stars be invisible at other times?" was Lagash, a planet that is part of a complex solar phenomenon that places three pairs of suns in the sky. Alpha, around which Lagash orbits, has a small red-dwarf companion named Beta. There are two more distant pairs. One pair is named Gamma and Delta: the other pair is not called by name (logically they would be Epsilon and Zeta, but the nomenclature is only figurative anyway). The result is that Lagash is virtually never in darkness, for one or more of the suns is always in the sky. But once every two thousand and forty-nine years, a large moon, neither seen nor suspected until just before the story begins, eclipses Beta when that sun alone is in the sky. The eclipse covers all of Lagash and lasts more than half a day. |
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This, improbable and unstable an astronomical configuration though it is, sets up Emerson's world of if. It is not an exact replica, perhaps because Asimov felt that a one-thousand-year cycle of savagery to civilization would be implausible, perhaps because the longer time span would be approximately the length of time between the height of the Roman Empire and the present, or between Athenian democracy and Newton. A more likely reason is that an exact parallel would seem contrived and the point of the story would be seen as a simple attack on Emersonian romanticism. |
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Four hundred years before the story opens, a scientist named Genovi 41 (the Lagashian Galileo) discovered that Lagash rotated around Alpha rather than vice versa. Since then, astronomers have recorded and analyzed the complex motions of the six suns. Twenty years before the story begins, the Law of Universal Gravitation was discovered (by the Lagashian Newton) and used to explain the orbital motions of the six suns. In the last decade, the motions of Lagash have been studied: the Law could not explain them, however, until a satellite of Lagash was |
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