A Geek History of Time - Episode 174 - I, Asimov Part I

Episode Date: September 3, 2022

I'm not here to poke holes and suspended this belief. Anyway, they see some weird shit. They decide to make a baby. Now, Muckin' Merchant. Who gives a fuck? Oh my god, which is a trickle, baby. You know what I mean? Well, you know, I really like it here. It's kind of nice and it's not as cold as Bacchus.

It's like a lot better than that. So yeah, sure, I think we're gonna settle. If I'm a peasant boy who grabs sword out of a stone. Yeah, I'm able to Open people up. Well, yeah any time I hit them with it, right? Yeah, so my cleave landing will make me a cavalier If syscloth it was empty headed Plabian trash. It's really good and gruey. Because cannibalism and murder, pull back just a little bit,

build walls to keep out the rat heads. And it's a little bit of a ground tunnel. A thorough intent doesn't exist. Some people stand up quite a bit, but some people stay seeing the rat heads. But it just... This is a geek history of time! Where we connect Nernary to the real world. My name is Ed Blaylock.

I'm a world history and English teacher at the middle school level here in Northern California. And my family is now coming out from under the shadow of Nurgle God of Plague. It's not COVID, not COVID, but last week around about Tuesday, my son mentioned in a conversation with my mother via FaceTime, that his ear was hurting. And I had been talking with my mother via FaceTime, that his ear was hurting. And I had been talking with my mother about an issue I was having with my ears. And so his mother and I just kind of assumed, you know, he's trying to be part of the conversation. Didn't really think anything of it because he's for and he wasn't acting like he was really

in any pain. So we just kind of brushed that off. Two days after that, we got a call from daycare that he woke up from his nap crying because his ear hurt. So, okay, he's gotten ear infection. And then the following day, my wife took the day off from work to take him to the doctor's office

and he was running a fever. Doctors determined he had not only the ear infection but the flu. And while they were in the doctor's office as the doctor is saying, yeah, it looks like it's probably influenza. My wife then broke out in full body sweats and nearly fainted. Wow. Like cold sweats all over her body had to sit down. They immediately got water and saw it hurt. And they were like, oh yeah, and you probably have it too. Test results came back. It was influenza A. And I then spent the next two days

madly trying to get Kaiser to give me tamiflu because I cannot be out of school right now. Right. You know, it's, you know, we try to keep this timeless, but it's the beginning of the school year. And I can't, I can't miss any time right now. So like I was completely freaking out. And so fortunately, everybody has passed, but it was a rough couple of days, not past. Sorry, everybody, the disease has passed over us. Okay. And it's gone now. Everybody, everybody has, has come out the other side. Okay. It's a better way for me to phrase that. I'm sorry, I realize it's been a long day. I'm sorry. But you know, everybody's okay now, but it was it made for it made for a very long weekend. Yeah, so that's that's what I've got going on.

How about you? Well, I went and visited a friend of mine at a pub called the Stark Raven Pub. Okay. Yeah, You have my attention. Yes. Yes. So this is actually friend of the show Tim Watts. Okay. Instead of getting to travel, he built himself a backyard pub.

Fuck yes. Yeah. We have children. He has a pub. I know. I know. I agree. I agree. Yeah. So I spent pretty cool. It was. I spent the afternoon with them because in addition to getting to hang out with him,

I got to pick up my copy of the Republic. Oh, nice. Yes. And I donated big time. So I got a hard cover, a soft cover, a whole bunch of wall art, a bookmark. I was stoked this could be. It was awesome. It was awesome. But it's amazing. But it's probably so freaking cool, dude.

Oh my God. Oh, I'm sure. It's a British pub made by a geek like. Oh, yeah. Well, I'm sure it's a British pub made by a by a geek like. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. Okay. Heck, Ironman posters everywhere. Nice. I don't just mean those was. I mean, like actual, the penciled art kind of stuff. It's, it's cool. It's, it's like, like comic comic book nerd comic book artist. Yes. And he's a huge Ironman fan. Okay. We're still friends despite that. But I was, I was going to say that kind of like, wow, you and you haven't cut him out of your life.

No, but you know, it's, it's, it's, it's really cool though, because like a lot of the art that he has is like, he and I were talking about it. We decided that the Robes gallery for Iron Man is actually superior to the Robes gallery for Spider-Man. Most of them stuck around longer and most of them honestly was and he pointed out he's like, yeah, that's due to Justin Hammer. Because Justin Hammer would just like fund guys to update. So Pace Pot Pete became the trapster. The beetle stopped having those stupid suction fingers, you know, stuff like that. And I'm like,

oh, that is exactly it. Yeah. Yeah. They evolved. So they had, yeah. Okay. So the art up is just it's, it's absolutely gorgeous. And, and it was a really fun time. And I got some comments. I believe it. So, yeah. Very cool. For those of you that don't know, Tim Watts is the comic book creator that we interviewed on episode 147 of our show. So go back and give that a listen when you're done with this. Speaking of which. Yes, sir. You've been reading something for a long time. A long time.

I've been reading a lot of things for a long time. Yeah. But for a long time, I have had this episode percolating. And I finally got off top dead center. And did the real world research involved in actually getting it put together? So I'm going to ask you, and this is going to be an interesting answer, because we've

established that I'm the one of the two of us that reads fiction. But if you had to choose a science fiction author who you think is the most influential overall, okay, not just on science fiction, but, but I'm... Culturally. Scientific thought, culturally, whatever. Okay. Who immediately, like, what name comes to your mind?

There's two names jump to mind immediately. Okay. Um, I'm gonna I'm gonna go top to bottom though. So yeah, I would absolutely say Eric Blair You might know him as George or well. Okay. Yeah, all right. I think good one 1984 and animal for I think those are both sci-fi enough. And I think that the his writing of 1984, 1984 definitely is animal farm. I would I would class as being well allegorical and like either magical realism or just straight up fantasy. But yeah, okay. Fair enough. Yeah. That works. But his writing overall, yeah. for instance, why I write or to kill an elephant or or or to kill an elephant is one of my favorites. Yeah. I think. So I think I think there's a good argument for him being like number one, but we're, you know, this is kind of like when when I'm brought up with the question of who is the best emperor in the world or the best emperor of Rome, I always liken it back to baseball. Are we talking longevity?

Are we talking peak performance? Peak performance. I don't think anybody could beat Orwell because 1984 is. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's a stated part. Orwell is the Sandy co-vax.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. He's the Sandy co-vax. The Saiyung would have to be Isaac Asmoth because he has a book in every single, dewy, decimal classification. Like in one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine, he's got books in all of them. Yes. I think he might be the only one. So he's the Saiyong. He's got that line of jettin. Yeah, he very well might and I've never read a bit of it.

Yeah, he very well might and I've never read a bit of it. Yeah, I've seen movies that were based loosely on what he wrote. So guess what? What? You're you're going to hear about one of the movies that that is that that uses the title of Asimov's work, um, the sisterhood of travel. Yes. Yes. Yes. As a matter of fact, yes, that classic of the science fiction genre. Yeah. No. It's the, it's the, uh, it's, it's the, one of the trilogy, right? Because there's how to make an American quilt sisterhood of traveling pants and sister act two. You never cease to amaze me that you're able to come up with a shit like just just so glibly like that. Yeah. And I hate you for it. I get that one.

You know, but right now I can't actually be mad. No, it's weird. I want to be. I still want to be sure. But no, so we're going to be talking about Isaac Asimov. And we're going to be talking about robots specifically. And we're going to get into the perennial issue of why the movie of just about anything frequently sucks compared to the book. Okay. Like that's that's the perennial, you know, the the trope complaint is, well, you know, the book was so much better. Well, the trope complaint.

Nice. Because it's perennial. Yeah. Nice. Nice. Nice. I got an often in response to that other than. So I'm as usual with these kinds of things, I are going to start by talking about the author himself. As a mom was born in Russia before you go any further than that. Yeah. He joined the American Navy and then became a writer. Is this? Yeah. Okay.

This is kind of a trend in this period of science fiction. Because, you know, when you think about it, the deal is men of this generation wound up serving a whole lot of them as a percentage of the population because of the war, because of a whole lot of other stuff. Oh, yeah. And actually, in his case, it was pre-war, but, but, you know, I was joking. Did he seriously join the American Navy? He did. Fuck it.

I was joking, actually. I was going for the truth. I got a double check about it. But actually, I'm conflating him with another science fiction author who did. Oh, okay. I bad. Because as a mob's name starts with an A not an H. So it was a 5050. Yeah.

There you go. Nice. So, but he was born in. So, but he was born in 2020. Okay. But he was born in Russia in late 1919 or early 1920. Okay. Because of his family circumstances, they're and and it being Russia in the, you know, 19 teens, there was not really a birth certificate. So he, for most of his life, he celebrated his birth on January 2nd. His family were millers.

So they were kind of middle-class peasants. Asimov as a name is derived from the Russian word for winter wheat. Interesting little tidbit. OK. The family immigrated to the US when he was three. He was naturalized as a US citizen at age eight and he never actually spoke Russian

because his parents always spoke to him in English and itish. Oh, okay. Now, I'm gonna have to spend another whole episode to cover the length and breadth of his career, because as you say he has an entry in every category of the decimal system. He is very well known, not only in genre stuff, he's not only well known as a science fiction author, but also as a mystery writer. And within the science fiction genre, it's really not too much to say that without his influence, science fiction, as we know it today, would be very, very different. Okay. Okay. In 1942, he started the foundation series that won him a one-time Hugo award for best series And foundation went on to influence Dune Star Wars the traveler role-playing game or hammer 40,000 and Star Trek

That's a lot Now the other series of his that originally was not conceived as being part of the same universe series of his that originally was not conceived as being part of the same universe, but as somebody authors do later in his career, he wrote connections between the two universes to turn it into one thing. The robot series. Introduced one robot, two robot, three robot, four robot. Yeah, right. No, because yeah, they made a movie out of one robot. See, this is where you being a Latin teacher causes a problem.

It's I, robot, the letter I, robot, not a neural, not a neural. I understand why you would get that confused. So you're commanding a robot to go. You're saying go robot. This product. It's English, not Latin. Oh, very confused.

Yeah. So different, different set of rules there. OK. But the robots series introduced the social implications of artificial intelligence. It is, it is the first series that really delves into the social implications of having so font non-humans, sure. Having man-made intelligent workers.

Other science fiction authors have talked about robots before, but it was just kind of assumed that, well, you know, they're robots, they're not people. You know, and Sandler just looks at this. And he actually said, okay, no wait, let's look at the implications of actually having thinking machines doing our work. What are the ethics of that? How is that going to affect society? The robots series really is a very early example of social science fiction. Can I interrupt and tell me

if you're gonna cover this later and I will stop. Okay. The Russian word for slave is the root for the word robot. Yes. Okay, he's Russian. His parents spoke Yiddish in English around him, which tells me that they were literate people. Yeah.

Did he get into the ethics of having mechanical slaves through the culture of the kitchen table? He did not expressly ever get there. Like, like, he was not as socially conscious in his analysis as more recent writers have been. Like, the idea that robots were going to be servants and were not going to have citizenship rights was just kind of a given in his writing because we'll have machines. You know, and so there was still that, that, I don't know if I'm going to say blind spot, I get blind spots probably weren't. I mean, you know, it's free to use, you know, he's growing up at a time when industrialism

is a given. And why would you think about smart tractors as being sentient? Like I kind of get that. Like, you know, thinking of, it's not like people thinking of teachers now where we're just fixtures. Yeah, we're just a furniture. Yeah, right. You know, it's, that makes sense because again, you know,

in 1900 was when we finally switched over to the 50, 50 of farm and city people. Yes. And you have a lot of the machines and stuff like that being sold in the city to the farmers. So yeah, he's growing up in the, you know, in a realm where that happened. Yeah. And in the, in the relatively recent, historically speaking, relatively recent aftermath of that.

Yeah. Right. So it would, right. So that makes sense. It would make sense. I wouldn't even call that a blind spot. I would, you know, maybe he's running the first lap for us. And then somebody else drives a baton and says, but what if they were sentient? Yeah. Okay.

So he also introduces a set of ideas that have come down to us ever since and have kind of become, they're codified in almost all of science fiction. They're not always literally called out, but they all, they kind of show up over and over. And this is the three laws of robotics. Okay. First law, a robot may not injure a human being or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Second law, a robot must obey orders given it by human beings,

except where such orders would conflict with the first law, right? Third law, a robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law. It feels very close to that second season episode where the guy wants to take apart data. Very, oh yeah. There it sits. Yes. Oh yeah, hugely.

And this conception of fully artificially intelligent beings, because it is the human looking robots in his work are data. I mean, they are essentially that's where the idea of an Android-like data with a positronic brain, the phrase positronic brain is actually taken, oh, really? From, yeah, from asthma.

Wow. And this has resonated through the genre ever since R2D2 and C3PO, O, their characteristics, at least in part to asthma was imagining of robots. Because I bet we could trace from asthma to, well, okay, you said he moved here would have been 22. So he would have been a young kid when metropolis was made. Yes. So, okay, so that you've got a bit of feedback loop there, then, too, because that must have

worked its way into his consciousness. And then he wrote stuff and then we get C3PO and R2D2. Okay. Yeah, there isn't anything in any literature that I found that like he never explicitly called out metropolis, but I'm sure it was in the background. It had to have been somewhere in the back of his brain. And so it's robots that we're here to talk about today. Okay. Specifically I robot. And how badly Holly would fuck it up. Really? Cause I liked it.

Of course, I never read asthma. So I, I, I enjoyed it, but I could look at it and go, this is a really good example of a heroic swing that clips it. a heroic swing that clips it. You don't get a home run. You get a really, really, really hard fly foul ball. Oh, wow. Okay. Okay. And I'm going to get into that. Yeah. So first of all, you do. Did you get it? Did you ever see the robot chicken episode where they did I robot Jetsons? Oh, God. No. And they're George Jetsons dead. It's either George that's dead or it's Spacely Sprocket who's dead. Okay. Yeah. And they're interrogating Rosie in the same same lines. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. find that. That's too good. Okay, so sorry. So as a mom's book, I robot is a collection of short stories that center on the interplay between the three laws and their implications. The moviebat, is clearly related, most closely, to the novel, The Caves of Steel,

which is the first novel in the robots series. Okay. So, it's pulling from all the source material to kind of amalgamate it into the one under the title, Irobat, though. Yeah, well, yeah. So The Caves of Steel appeared first in serial form in galaxy science fiction starting in October 1953. And it is an artifact of its time in a whole lot of ways. It is supposed to take place. Now I gotta look at my notes here, but it's in what is even for us the far future,

several centuries farther and forward in the future. And there is no internet. There are no cellular communications several times in the course of the book, the investigator main character has to, you know, find a phone on a wall to make a phone call. And there are computers showing up all over the place, but they are not interconnected with each other. There is no connectivity. The very concept of a worldwide, you know, guest-altered computer network was just was so far removed from what anybody had conceived of computers doing that, like that's not there. Now, my favorite bit of, bit of Z-Rust in this work though is there's an awful lot that gets made of the staggering population of earth. That the population of earth is humongous and teaming and people are living literally, you know, elbow to elbow, cheek to jowl on top of each other in caves of steel, gigantic megacities.

And the only way to manage the population is to build these metallic hives and have everybody live off nutritional yeast, like, you know, right. And this population, this population, by the way, is eight billion. What are we at now? Seven points, something? We're estimated to have hit 7.9 billion sometime around December of 2021. Oh, wow. We still haven't figured out how to build a real arcoology to my terrible disappointment. But that's basically what what as a month envisioned was he didn't call it that, but it's essentially in our college. It's such a gigantic vertically built, you know, city, you know, integrated city. This makes sense that he would think that we get that high in the ability to do that though. Yeah. Because in the 1950s, we had people actually thinking

that vaccines were a good idea. Well, yeah. And so people acting in their own best interests might actually do stuff that would help us all. So, well, people, people acting rationally in their long term best interests, even their short term best interest. Yes, but you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, yeah, he didn't have the, I'm gonna make the liberals cry by setting my, my house on fire. Yeah, I'm gonna throw my curricut to win a little show you. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, don't give me the John Burke society had started by then, but they were still someone they were they were in full swing. They, I mean, they were, they were relatively new, but, you know, they do what they, they were relatively new, but you know, they do what they were already, they were all going. So, uh, so these giants, so seven, seven, seven, eight billion people on the planet, like

dude, yeah, Isaac, buddy, I have some disappointing news for you. Yeah. And so his robots run on positronic brains. And in the 1950s, just real quick, I think we're at 2 billion at that point or how we got up to three. I believe we're I think in 53 they were encroaching on 3 billion. Yeah, yeah, you're right, because 2 billion was around 1900. And then another 50 years, it on three billion. Yeah, yeah, you're right because two billion was around 1900 Mm-hmm And then another 50 years it was three billion and then because I remember when we hit six when I was in high school So you were probably like I don't know in grad school or something But I remember we hit six and now we're about to hit eight. Yeah, we're just just we may already have done it

Well, we might have bounced back and we might have, yeah, this is over the last couple of years. Yeah. So, okay. So, positive, positive, miniaturized computers. But, again, with the Z-Rust in the setting, the use of computers in daily life is comparatively limited. The main character, our investigator, is doing paperwork in his office. You know, they have robots, they have robots who are acting as secretaries doing paper,

building out forms. It's so funny to find the limits of imagination with this stuff. Yeah, it really is. It's amazing. Real quick for our listeners and for me, yeah, Z-Rust, explain. Oh, okay, sorry.

Sure. It's a term taken like so many of mine are from TV tropes. And it is the stuff that happens in science fiction, when a work of science fiction gets 30 or 40 years old. And you start to see that the vision of the future that we had 30 or 40 years ago was so very 30 or 40 years ago. It's like going to Epcot Center now. Yeah, Epcot Center is the physical embodiment of the rest. Here's what people in the 70s thought that the 90s would be. These were

going to look like. Yeah. Okay, I get you. Yeah. Um, like, um, for historical futurism, the historical future. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Uh, first example, pop some of my head is think of, um, the movie Logan's run. Okay. And, and the way they thought people were going to dress. Yeah. In the far future. Right. You know, the, the idea that, you know, for some reason throughout the history of the genre, the thought has been, well, we're going to get far enough in the far future. You know, the idea that, you know, for some reason, throughout the history of the genre, the thought has been, well, we're going to get far enough in the future. Men are going to start wearing tunics again.

Like, uh-huh. You know, that kind of thing. They were close in the 60s, late 60s early 70s. They were. But that's part of the reason that so many science fiction settings are wearing them.

Right. Because, like, this is the kind of edge. Yeah. On, you know, take us 200 years of the reason that so many science fiction settings are wearing them right because like this is the cut of edge now on you know take us 200 years of the future. It's going to be a lot of colors will be offset. Yeah a lot of trying to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I get you. So anyway, that's zero. Zero. Thank you. So now in this future of of azimuths humanity has split broadly into two factions. Earthers, which is exactly what it says on the 10 people on earth and spacers in his setting humans have colonized roughly somewhere in a neighborhood of 50 worlds and spacer worlds rely very heavily on robot labor and have populations in the hundreds of millions, whereas earth has the aforementioned 8 billion people living on it. This is already getting uncomfortable. And the standard of living is demonstrably lower on earth for the people living on earth than that of the average reader of the book in the 1950s.

Things are more crowded, their living space is more constrained, their diet is more limited. Okay. Most earthers have a profound distrust rising to antipathy for human-like robots. Earth-built robots are much more limited in capability than those built by spacers. Earth-built robots are smart machines. They don't think. They are like, imagine, I'm trying to think if your if your refrigerator was smart enough to Sense and throw out food when it goes bad That's that's kind of the the brain power level of earth or robots. Okay They can do a few simple tasks, but they're not, they don't rise to the level of sounding or thinking like a human. Roombas and refrigerators, like specialized to the meal task.

Yeah, not conversational. Yeah. Okay. So, uh, programmable, not trainable? Yeah. Okay. That's a good way of putting it. Yeah.

Most earthers in his setting are also cripplingly agoraphobic, because they live their entire lives inside the caves of steel. So they, if they have to go out into the open, many of them will be crippled by panic attacks. They can't handle being out in the open for significant periods of time. Sure. Because they've been acclimatized

to always having a roof over their heads. There is very significant tension between earth and the spacer worlds. And very high level, thinking people within space or society at the start of the first novel have begun to believe that their culture is becoming stagnant. They want to encourage more space exploration. They want to try to find a way to get earthers to go out and explore more planets. Now, the whole book is a murder mystery, which is fun because this is as a

mouth playing in both of his main genres at once right a Diplomat and scientist from the Spacer worlds has been murdered It's up to New York City detective Elijah Bailey and highly advanced spacer robot Deniel Oliva to solve the crime So basically the spacer So basically the spacer embassy for lack of a better word insists, you're going to have our guy working on this with you and our guy is going to be this Android. Okay. Who outwardly is human? Anybody looking at him is going to think he's a human.

He is however a human. He is, however, a robot. Who, who, by the way, not only does he look human, he looks exactly like his creator, who is the guy who was murdered. Okay. Which turns out to be an important plot point. Okay. Plot wise, the story is pretty straightforward. In the end, the murder was committed by the police commissioner Who thought he was shooting the robot by the way spoilers for you know 70-year-old novel The police commissioner actually thought he was shooting Daniel the robot With a blaster, but in in fact He shot the human this this was an attempt to try to sabotage the,

you know, C robots are just like us, you know, campaign by the spacers. As I said in my notes, the book's been out for 68 years. I'm not really spoiling anything. Pros-wise, Asimov is remarkably spare. He does not paint very detailed pictures of much of anything. He doesn't spend it off a lot of time on adjectives. The concepts and ideas get a lot more development through dialogue and character reaction.

Whereas the physical environment, he paints a very, very spare picture and then lets you kind of run with it. The themes of the book center on prejudice, colonialism, although oddly in reverse, because earth is the weaker party in a relationship. The ethics of artificial intelligence, and to an extent, the question of what makes someone human. intelligence and to an extent the question of what makes someone human. Okay. So now this leads us to why why was the book the way it was. Now we're going to take, now we got our history lesson. Here's here's your vegetables boys and girls. Right. Univac was developed starting in 1946 and it was funded in large part by the census bureau 46 and it was funded in large part by the census bureau

Which I had learned somewhere and forgotten and then re-learned and and I find that remarkable But of all that have all in the 1940s late 40s after the war after the war of all the government Organizations of government, you know parts of the government that would have been funding computer technology, you know, I immediately would have thought it would have been department of defense or somebody like that, but no, it was the census bureau to help them with calculation of census statistics. Right. I mean, the 19th of the upcoming 1950 census. Right. You know, in 51, a Univac mainframe computer predicted a landslide victory for Eisenhower despite Gallup polling showing he had a much smaller lead in the popular vote. Okay, or, you know, this is then in the 52 election, you know, the ones that even send the first time, yeah.

Yeah, and the army requested a Univac machine from Congress in 1951. So they looked at it and went, you know what? Actually, there's a lot of shit we could use this for. Yeah. The transistor got developed in 1947 at Bell Laboratories, kick starting the process of miniaturization of computers as switches got smaller. Now, a character in Asimov's novel has lost his job at the police department.

He worked at the front desk and he's been replaced by a robot. Referencing fears regarding the potential for automation to push people out of work. Now, I'm going to jump forward in time a little bit because this immediately made me remember, hey wait a minute, there's a Tracy Hepburn movie that I remember from years ago back in a prior life that was about a computer and a group of people being worried about losing their jobs. The movie was desk set, Hepburn Tracy Romcom. It centers on the reference library of a major company facing the introduction of a mainframe called Emorac.

All the library staff are convinced they're getting fired. Tracy plays the computer's inventor. Hepburn is the head of the library staff. It's a really cute movie. It's based on a stage play built around the same ideas in 1955. Okay. So that's all floating., those ideas are floating around in 52, 53 already because computers had entered the popular consciousness. You know, they're in the early 50s. Is there also something going on here though that because you know, you can serve two masters when you're writing something. Is there also something going on here about the robots being second class citizens?

And the the earthers being looked down upon the colonialists being the the higher ends, it just feels like white fear of the Braceros, that kind of thing, or is this, I mean, it's obviously automation. But is there anything in there in, it's, it's a social science fiction? Is there anything in there about like others where it's a race kind of thing? There isn't anything overt. There isn't anything that you can look at and be like, oh, well, you know, okay, clearly in this moment, this is, this is, be like, oh, well, you know, okay, clearly in this moment. This is this is You know standing in for you know the you know for or well being you know send off to kill the elephant right right kind of situation

But it was ongoing because my next set of notes is talking about collapse of empires. Oh, well What's what what is what is interesting is there is a certain level of reflection, subconscious, their scorn in their distrust and their xenophobia at. Okay. So there's a xenophobia that does get exercised on an other group. Yeah. Okay. But like you said, it's not, it's not explicit.

It's not. Yeah. But like you said, it's not explicit. It's not. Yeah, it's not. He's not that's that's not a metaphor as a mob. As a mob was not that kind of progressive. There was not that like, yeah, he later later authors would would take that particular baton and be like, okay, I'm a run so far with this, but as a mob wasn't one there yet. Now, of course, in the wake of World War II, we've talked about this in a whole bunch of different episodes. The major empires of Europe disintegrated.

You know, because they essentially collapsed under their own weight in the wake of the damage that was wrought by the war. And just this wave of decolonization happened. Yeah, my favorite statistic is prior to 1945, no colonized people rose up against the colonizer in one. After 1945, no colonized people rose up against the colonizer and lost. And lost, yeah. And so the idea of colonies overtaking and then potentially dominating their former overl overlords was subcont was a subconscious phobia sure in the minds of anybody who'd been on top of the old order. So anybody in because they're on top and a minority. Yeah. So, as I'm off probably like I just said, he probably didn't intend any

kind of anti-colonialist message, but there's an undercurrent of kind of reaping what one soes in the future history that he wrote. Yeah, okay. And there's this weird focus on colonialist, on we and degeneracy. In the next book in the series, Bailey winds up traveling to a colony world on which the inhabitants have developed a culture of touch phobia. Because on earth, everybody is packed in, chic to jowl, you know, putting in cramped living quarters and, you know, everything.

in chic to jowl, you know, living in cramped living quarters and, you know, everything. And, and, you know, you can't get away from other people, whereas on this colony world he travels to, there is so much space that it's, it's a major plot point that the murder victim assumed he was speaking to a hologram and not his murderer. And so on this colony, people have all of their children via artificial means. And Bailey actually has a moment where he calls them all out for their complacency. All their work is done by robots. They live like ancient Roman, sort of looking for plantation owners. Sure. The Latifundia.

Yeah, there you go. Thank you. And they don't do any work. All of everything they do is all mental and airy fairy and they don't get their hands dirty. And he nearly gets murdered. And so when he shows up, he, you know, in his, this is why you all suck speech.

He kind of can write. Right. And so there's this interesting, like weird idea of like colonialists, because I mean, obviously the colonialists here are literally colonialists and there's this idea of the overclass in a colony being decadent and complacent and all this kind of stuff.

Which I don't think he consciously would have, like, he wasn't writing this as a Marxist polemic against, you know, colonialism, but there is this really weird cultural kind of critique going on. And then additionally, at the same time, and that's going on, there's a case to be made for the idea that the post-war years were this time of dramatic increase in the pace of technological advancement. Yeah, things just, I mean, as soon as Transistor came in, like you said,

miniaturization happened and with that came an onslaught of, you know, this year's computer's mainframe is half the room. Yeah, you know, not four after that and the one after that, right, you know, a corner of the room. Right. And the one after that and the one after that, is a corner of the room. So, but beyond just electronics, we're also talking about nuclear weapons,

quote unquote, making war obsolete, satellite communications, creating the possibility for instantaneous or near instantaneous communication across the globe. Right. Everything associated with the space race, which we've talked about in previous episodes, and the rapid introduction of automation, like the kitchen, what is

the kitchen sink debates? Oh, the kitchen debates. The kitchen debates. The introduction of all of the labor-saving devices that entered in the American household in starting in the 1950s, automatic dishwashers, electric refrigerators, blenders. Blenders, yeah, all of these dude dads, these gadgets, right, that, you know, if we wanna get back to the idea of, you know, making human labor obsolete, prior to the 1950s, most middle class households

had a cook or a maid. After the 1950s, no, that's mom's job because she has a vacuum cleaner, she has, right, you know, she cleaner. She has a machine to wash the clothes, and a machine to drive them, and all of these labor-saving devices. Number one, put a lot of people, a lot of people of color, out of work, and simultaneously trapped white middle- class women in their homes. Right. Which was a deliberate thing because you had the boys coming back and needing jobs. Well, yes.

And in fairness, they deserve to come back to jobs. Yes, they did. The problem is it doesn't have to be zero sum. Yeah, the trouble is everybody looked at is zero sum game And it really didn't need to be Shouldn't have been I'm actually gonna make the Gonna make the judgment call there that shouldn't have been a zero sum game. Yes But sexism so there you go

Mm-hmm, and so as a mom winds up writing this novel that is this very pro-Z-ic kind of murder mystery, that once you get past a couple of very clever twists that he throws in, the explanation of the mystery winds up being pretty straightforward. It's still very much worth reading though, but it winds up being so much more than that because he winds up touching on all of these different chords in the popular subconscious. You know, there's all this stuff going on kind of all at once. And he was personally most excited about, you know the actual idea of the caves of steel. Was what he actually thought was like the really cool idea here was this concept of this massive

high of city where people travel from one end of the city to the other on a gigantic, essentially a moving walkway. You know, an escalators to get from different levels, you know, up and down. And somebody reading the book, it's funny, Asimov was, was himself somewhat agoraphobic, or actually it might be fairer to say he was claustrophilic. And somebody said to him, you know, I read the book and I was just shocked to my core, it sounds like a nightmare. And he says, really?

It sounds great to me. I don't know what you're talking about. And when he moves on from the first book to the later books, he gets into really looking at social psychology. As, you know, he takes an idea out of what people were talking about in social psychology at the time, and then builds on that. In the next book, which is the one where husbands and wives live in separate houses miles apart from each other, and conversation is not done face to face unless it's absolutely unavoidable. Psychological, you know, cultural psychological studies were just coming out at the time that we're talking about social spacing

and like the way that here in the United States, for example, if you and I were in person and we were standing to have a conversation, we would stand roughly far enough apart that like you would be able to reach out and stick your thumb in my ear. And that's like comfortable distance is not quite arm's length distance. Whereas in a lot of countries in the world, it's not uncommon to be half that distance apart from each other. Yeah, right up on each other. Right up on each other. And then in some other cultures.

Exactly. You're farther apart, you know, specifically, especially in some Asian cultures, you're farther apart. I was going to actually say, you know, the place where I saw this or the places where I saw this kind of disgust were highlighted as Japan and England, where your distance is, you know, I would say a sword's distance plus a few inches. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, it would make sense that you would value and show people respect with that space when you live on an island.

Yes, and you can't get away from each other. Yeah. Whereas if you're living say in a desert where storms kick up and being near each other is a safety thing, yeah, holding each other's forearms while you're talking, knows to knows, makes a lot of sense. Yes. You know, and so he, makes a lot of sense. Yes. You know. And so he takes these social ideas and runs with them. And then, you know, extends them, like science fiction authors do, you know, extends them to some level of extreme.

And then, you know, picks them apart and examines them. And that is what makes the book of the Caves of Steel really worth reading. Again, the mystery novel is meh. I mean, it's well put together, it's good, but it's not, you know, it isn't shocking in any way. Right, it's not groundbreaking as a mystery, it's't shocking in any way. Right. It's not groundbreaking as a mystery. It's just a service of mystery.

Yeah. But as an examination of what it's decided to look like, when we have a billion people living on a planet, sorry, I can't help but say it that way. It's like Holy cow, Isaac. But when you talk about population density, it's an amazing study. Yeah. When you look at, you know, what's going to happen when we colonize other planets, what is, how is, how is society going to change? And of course, consciously or subconsciously,

he's reflecting what he sees going on around him and what he's writing. And so the relationship between the colony worlds and earth is a fun house mirror reflection of what people thought might happen with formerly colonized countries. Right. You know. And so that is his book. So what do we call that? When someone accidentally trips over And so that is his book. So what do we call that? When someone accidentally trips over a really salient thing to get to a thing that they really wanna do that's kind of mundane. That's a good question.

You know, because like, I mean, what you just said was that he essentially tripped over brilliance to get to what he thought would be brilliant that turned out not to be all that. Yeah. You know, it just kind of turned out to be middling. Yeah, and I don't know. Okay. I'm not sure what we'd call that, but I mean, you've you've a couple of times said, fell backward into success. Yeah, but I mean, you know, but it's not quite the same thing. Right. Because he wasn't, he was, he was trying to be successful with, with a mystery novel. And like you said, it was perfectly serviceable.

It wasn't a terrible mystery. It just happened to be that the thing that mattered more was the setting and what have you. Yeah. Despite the fact that he didn't really describe the setting much. Like that's the other thing. He describes the facts, but well, okay, when, when and if you ever read Asimov, what you learn is he's just not a detailed guy. Like in what he, he's not, he's not, he's the like Tolkien, is it one end of the spectrum, where he'll spend pages describing a fucking tree. Right.

And then Azimov is on the other side, which is, it was a city. There were eight million people living in it. It was huge and cave-like and built of steel. And there you go. Like, what are you picture that looking like run with it? You know, right. And yet at the same time, it's the setting that you're saying is so groundbreaking.

Yeah. Despite his total minimalism in describing it. Yeah, but it's the thing is it's the concept. He's a high concept science fiction writer. Oh, we had another guy like that. And we've had a story. It starts with an age. Was it Highland?

Um, Highland somewhat, but yes and no, it depends on which of his works you're talking about. Okay. So that's that is, I'm gonna call this the first half of this one. Sure, sure. Because that's the book. So I've established for you what the book Caves of Steel is about. And when we get together again, I'm going to talk about the movie, I robot with Will Smith. Oh, I thought we were going to do Blades of Glory about the figure skater. Who was a, you know, I don't even know where you got that one from like steels of blades okay right three words yeah three words sounds like chainsaw yeah yeah okay I don't know okay okay so um based on what we've talked about so far, what do you think?

What's your takeaway right now? Well, I'm curious, did this fall under science fiction? Did it fall under mystery in the Dewey Decimal System? Science fiction. It's mostly categorized as science fiction. The mystery is the plot maguffin, but it is true because it centers around robots and you know, and our ecology. So it sounds like Dewey or whoever classified it in the system, because by that point I think Dewey was gone, because I think he died in the 20s or the 40s.

Yeah. But so whoever classified it in Dewey also saw what you saw, which is, yeah, it's mystery. But really it's about mostly it's about, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it's the 50s. We're getting into absurdism as a thing. We're getting into nuclear annihilation. It kind of makes sense that people are living in caves of steel. It kind of makes sense that people are living in caves of steel. Given that I grew up at a time when we watched the Matrix and they were all living underground and in 50 people were building bunkers. Oh yeah. So like all of that, you know, it all fits, it all tracks.

Yeah. Ties together. There is a question of the ethical existence. So you've got a little bit of existentialism. You don't have the anguish and banishment despair, but you do have the three laws. Yeah, I do find it interesting those laws though, because the last one is, you gotta protect yourself too.

Unless you can protect yourself, prevents you from saving human or following the orders of the human right right. So I just know yeah it's it's and and there's there's there has actually been an awful lot of uh ink spilled of uh people commenting about the order in which the laws apply. Oh, the first, the first law, first law, can't allow a human to come to harm. Are they, can't allow a human to come to harm? Dac, and the intent is, the first law is the most important one.

Second law is right after that, Third law is right after that. Okay. So yeah, I could see that being a place to argue as well because are they sequential? Are they prioritized? Do they stack? Like it's kind of like when people look at the bill of rights. Yeah. Yeah. You learn real quick that it's not a priority list because Okay, number one, you'd be like, yeah, that's pretty fucking high priority and number two You could absolutely argue that that's a really high priority because there is a school of thought of you can't have number one without number two There is there is a school of thought that follows that despite all the evidence otherwise But but then you get to number three and you're like, oh, this isn't a priority list

This is not really a priority. Yeah, this is this is this is your bitching about this. Yeah. This is a pet peeve. Yeah. Really matter to you. It's primarily a pet peeve. This really mattered to you. But like how often is this going to come up? Like really quarter of soldiers. Yeah. I would, I would actually say that from after number 10, 11 to 27 have been about priority because they're roughly every 20 years. Yeah. There are a few, a few spates where you had a bunch in a row where you've got to solve the biggest problem of the time.

Yes, institutionally. So, yeah, I would say that, you know, that's a temporal priority. But yeah, but the asmoth three roles. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't see them as a priority list. I see them much more as this builds off of it. Like number two can't exist without number one. So it's a question to me. Yeah. So not having read any of it. Yeah, well. So. Hmm.

All right. Interesting that he's Russian too. There is, there is a bleakness in Russian authors. Yeah. And he's not Russian culturally, but at the same time, his family, they're escaping pogroms. He, he, he has that in his background.

Yeah. You know, and, and again, they're escaping pogroms. He, he, he has that in his background. Yeah. You know, and, and again, they're escaping pogroms. So you've got, you know, that kind of stuff going on too. Well, by the time they left, well, yeah, no pogroms, but just in a different direction. Yeah. Yeah. Different, different source of authority, but yeah, it'll do. And actually, they, they would have, they would have been running primarily because they were cool locks. Right. More, more than Jewish, have been running primarily because they were cool ox

right More more than Jewish would have been because they were cool ox sure sure we got a we got a get the fuck out Yeah, so cool. Well, so what's your reading? Right now I am reading to gun witch by friend of the show Bishop O'Connell and I have only had time to sit down and get a few pages into it. But it is amazing. I'm gonna say historical fantasy, but it's a significantly,

the universe in which it takes place is significantly divergent from our own in a number of fundamental ways. So I feel like it needs a different moniker than historical fantasy because it's not just, well, anyway, it is classified as historical fantasy. In just the first couple of pages, it manages to be, it manages to hit multiple buttons of mine all at once. And so it's so far, it's amazing. And I have every confidence based on everything else is written and it's just going to get better from there. Very nice. Highly recommended, highly highly recommended, check it out. How about you? Well, I am currently reading the Republic by a friend of the show Tim

Watts. There you go. And the only place you can get it right now is at Empire Comics down on Fulton in Sacramento. So look up Empire Comics, then walk in with your mask on, uh, pet the pugs and ask them for Tim Watts's The Republic. It's a really good read. Um, I'm looking forward to reading it this time without the watermarks in the middle of it. Uh, but it's, uh, it's a really good read and I highly recommend it. So that's what I'm going to tell everybody to go for.

So Empire Comics in on Fulton Street in Sacramento asked for the Republic by Tim Watts. Do they have a website that you might be able to order it from them on if you're not actually in Sacramento or the Sacramento Metro area? You mean Empire Comics today? Yeah. Oh yeah, a quick Google search. If you just typed in Empire Comics Sacramento, they have a Facebook page. I know they have a presence there.

And as far as their website, if I recall correctly, it is, by the way, they also, it's just Empire Comics.com. Yeah, they also sell hot sauce, by the way, which I always get a kick out of. All right. Yeah, so yeah, that's, that's what I recommend. So for a geek history of time, I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm Ed Blalock, and until next time, go forth and send no more. more.