Nightfall by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fifteen Minutes in the Dark

The best science fiction looks backwards into the past as well as speculating forward into the future, linking things we think (or thought) we’re sure of with things that don’t exist. Comparing the two can be sobering as well as enlightening.

Asimov writes just this kind of inter-temporal story in Nightfall. On the one hand it anticipates things like the debates about climate change and dark matter that wouldn’t emerge more articulately for decades. On the other, it contains historical echoes of philosophical and theological issues from Pascale’s Wager to Galileo’s condemnation by the Church, to the impact of Kantian categories of perception. The story then mixes the anticipatory and the completed into a sort of a theory of Mind and explores the delicate dependency of Mind upon expectations as well as memory - specifically the dependency on light among a species unfamiliar with darkness.

As one of Asimov’s characters says, “Your brain wasn’t built for the conception [of total darkness] any more than it was built for the conception of infinity or of eternity. You can only talk about it. A fraction of the reality upsets you, and when the real thing comes, your brain is going to be presented with the phenomenon outside its limits of comprehension.” A very interesting premise. What then?

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