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government spokesman, who has been considered a villain, unable to suppress the broad release of the invention. |
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The depiction of a government acting responsibly to suppress an invention with major social implications must have appealed to Campbell as a reversal of Astounding's traditional position in favor of freedom of thought, inquiry, and publication. The government agent says, ". . . you all just took it for granted that the government was stupidly bureaucratic, vicious, tyrannical, given to suppressing research for the hell of it. It never occurred to any of you that we were trying to protect mankind as best we could." The story no doubt appealed to Asimov, too, as an example of how social considerations should influence scientific decisions. |
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"Profession" (Astounding, July 1957) considers a future Earth where skills are imprinted electronically on the brain. A society has grown up to prepare young people for this event, which will be important to Earth, the mother planet of a group of more prosperous and more powerful colonies. Earth specializes in the production of education tapes, which it sells to the other planets, and also exports tape-imprinted skilled workers. The process helps to keep the Galactic culture unified. George Platen, the protagonist of the story, is told that his "mind is not suited to receiving a superimposed knowledge of any sort." He struggles against his fate as he becomes a ward of the planet and is sent to be with others of his kind in a place that he is told finally is "A House for the Feeble Minded." After escaping and trying to make a place for himself in the world of the educable, however, Platen discovers that he is one of the elite, one of the few who have the capacity for original thought, who invent the new instrument models and make the educational tapes. The system used to deceive him is defended as necessary both to protect the majority from considering themselves failures and to identify the creative minority who refuse to accept what they have been told. "It is much safer," one character explains, to wait for a man to say, ''I can create, and I will do so whether you wish it or not." But the justification for deception remains a bit unconvincing; it seems more like Campbell's idea than Asimov's. |
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Finally came one of Asimov's best-known and, by many, best-loved stories, "The Ugly Little Boy" (Galaxy, September 1958). The work illustrates the two basic kinds of story development: one presents the protagonist with a problem or a series of problems that he or she must solve, the other introduces a character and places that character under a stress that changes him or her. Asimov seldom wrote the second kind of story. In an interview, he said. "I don't know that I have the kind of |
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