Those Amazing Electronic Thinking Machines by Isaac Asimov

Gibson's vision seems so different from Asimov's thinking that one would think its success would have prompted some reaction from the sci-fi Juggernaut. To get to my topic, question or whatever, do you guys have any idea if Asimov ever read cyberpunk literature or other such more dystopian literature in the late 1900s and write critiques about it? To use Neuromancer as an example I understand it was regarded as a masterpiece quite soon after its publication, well before Asimov's death. (To be fair, there are several modern cyberpunk games and movies about, but comparing to the 80's I'd say they still pale in comparison) His answer was 'That would be very bad entertainment because we already live in a cyberpunk world!'. Anecdotally, I once asked an acquaintance why cyberpunk isn't as popular today as more clean and high-tech sc-ifi is. Utopian visions feel naive considering the cultural climate, or that's at least what I feel. We are not threatened as much by totalitarian states as we possibly were in Huxley's and Orwell's times, but instead we are beset by accelerating technological development and rise of corporate power. Now, the reason I find Neuromancer/cyberpunk so enthralling is because their vision seems so obvious and believable in today's world. Even though my total scope of cyberpunk still limits pretty much to Gibson's writing I still feel that the genre was perfect right then, right there on the pages of Neuromancer. Before that I could never imagine science fiction being so bleak, so nihilist, so.real. Neuromancer was the first 'hard scifi' book I ever read and it struck me like a lightning bolt. I immediately started thinking about my absolute favorite author - William Gibson. It should also be noted that in other essays Asimov bashes any kind of luddism and paints a utopian picture of the future - largely heralded by thinking machines.

Such writers were more ready to accept the fear half of the love/fear relationship of man to machine'. Asimov writes that science fiction popularized in the 1960's and 1970's, which also led (according to him) to a shift back to dystopianism and pessimism, largely because 'the new generation of science fiction writers had no knowledge of science, no sympathy for it - and were in fact rather hostile to it. He also provides a small history of science fiction writing concerning its shifts from utopian visions to dystopian ones. A particular essay, 'The Machine and the Robot', caught my eye.Īs in several other essays, Asimov explains there why he chooses to depict robots as he does not as Frankenstein monsters to be afraid of, but benign thinking (and sometimes feeling) companions of humans. I especially like the little essays towards the end of the book, where Asimov discusses his philosophy regarding robots.

Just today I finished reading Isaac Asimov's Robot Visions and, as its companion book Robot Dreams, it was awesome.

Those Amazing Electronic Thinking Machines by Isaac Asimov