Sunday Sermonette: Isaac Asimov

Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
--Isaac Asimov

Comments

[ghostcatbce]

Isaac Asimov was among the first of the great Science Fiction writers I started to read when I was younger. Being that he actually was a scientist, it's no wonder his books rang so true. Or that his words are still relevant. Not that he always wrote weighty tomes. Some of his work was genuinely funny.

[John]

I always have loved that quote, and have used it on more than one occasion.

[Orac]

Yep. That's one of my favorite Asimov quotes of all time. It's one of the quotes that I use in my .sig file from time to time.

[sennoma]

something you dreamt up after being drunk all night

That's a hypothesis. If it survives the hangover and you go on to test it, then it might grow up to be a theory.

[gordo]

This explains why they think Intelligent Design is a scientific theory.

[gordo]

On a side note, Asimov was so prolific that I always imagined him lecturing to a Chemistry class while typing stories. Or in his lab scribbling a story in his notebook, looking up every paragraph or so to monitor an experiment.

[R. Mildred]

I so wanted to call a libertarian a "solarian" the other day, but didn't think they'd get that I was referencing asimov.

asimov was the anti-voyager of psuedo-science babble, he made it sound plausible and believable.

[Billy Boy]

Robots of Dawn, Asimov's obvious premonition/fortelling of those crazy whacky republicans running the whitehouse, the war and the cost of oil stright through the roof of middleclass contempt in 2005.

[Julian Elson]

I don't know. I think Asimov was a good... uh... science fiction-ist, but I don't think he was a very good writer. He got better as he aged, to be sure: Harry Seldon from Prelude to the Foundation was a lot more believable than any of the characters in the original Foundation series, but really, I mean, the dialogue he wrote wasn't really plausible or interesting. Maybe when it comes to sci-fi, I'm too much of a Haymaker and not enough of a Hairshirt like Lindsay.

[Chuchundra]

Back in the old days, SF was literature for real men. There was none of this sissy, girly nonsense about elegant prose, well-formed characters and believable dialog. We had steel-clad robots and plenty of 'em. There were mile-long starships, terrible, awesome weapons and worlds beyond imagining, not to mention all manner of political and social commentary dressed up as bug-eyed aliens.

To call the good doctor a poor writer is to completely miss the point.

[Squashed Lemon]

Posted by: Chuchundra | November 21, 2005 at 10:47 AM

lol. ya...girl should stay away from sci-fi befor ethey are turning it into soap opera in space.... :P

but there is a good scifi written by woman, and the story is unusual, rather than bang-bang spaceship goes kaboom. It's more a dialectic of perception. (Doomsday book. Connie willis, 1992)

But it's right tho' we barely have a good scifi novel that we can read like futuristic psycho thriller suspense.

[Grumpy]

Something for the next sermonette: Penn Jillette's "This I Believe" essay, heard on NPR this morning.

[blogenfreude]

Betcha' the writers of the Book of Revelations had wicked hangovers though ...

[bob crane]

asimov is a buzz-kill.

[Alon Levy]

Doomsday Book isn't that good... when I read it I liked it, but in retrospect it seems quite pointless.

Also, how is The Robots of Dawn's Aurora a Republican-style society? It does sound a little bit like Huxley's Brave New World, in a way, but nothing like a neo-conservative society.

[Don]

blogenfreude,

There was more than booze involved in that wierdness.

[Joseph]

Asimov is my hero.