Does anyone recall this science fiction story?

[papsrus]

Wow. Isaac Asimov. I'm a little surprised.

Seems a trifle mordant for him.

As I'm not much of a science fiction buff, he would have been my first guess.

[Larry Kart]

Got the Asimov collection it's in -- "The Winds of Change" -- at the library. Will read the story ASAP, perhaps will report back if it turns out to fit my belief that this story accidentally predicted how in the face of actual space flight the science fiction genre itself would be altered (and IMO would virtually drip away in slow motion into streams of fantasy, space opera, counterculture-tinged woo-woo stuff, feminist tendentiousness, just plain pretentiousness, etc.). If so, it's funny that Asimov didn't collect this 1957 story for almost two decades because he thought it had been almost immediately rendered pointless by the fact of actual space flight. In one sense, sure, but as I see it, not at all.

[BruceH]

Well, I personally see nothing wrong with "Space Opera" as long as it's well done. (Most of the "Star Wars" movies are examples of crappy Space Opera.)

[Larry Kart]

Well, I personally see nothing wrong with "Space Opera" as long as it's well done. (Most of the "Star Wars" movies are examples of crappy Space Opera.)

Me either -- I love, or used to love, E.E. (Doc) Smith and others. But Space Opera that comes in the wake of what once would have called "modern" science fiction is, by and large, science fiction's version of Wynton Marsalis -- "traditional" in demeanor but without the core flame/dream/ethos/what have you that first-generation Space Opera had. IMO, of course.

[Larry Kart]

Read the story; it's a very good one, definitely in the mordant vein of "Nightfall." As for how it fits into my "thesis," I guess I've already laid that out enough until I actually go on to write that part of the chapter that it may be part of and see how it links up to other things there.

An especially interesting, shrewd (as one might expect) document on the nature of "classic modern" science fiction is from one of its chief masters: Robert Heinlein's 1959 essay "Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults, and Virtues," which is in Damon Knight's collection "Turning Points: Essays on the Art of Science Fiction."

[BruceH]

Wow. Isaac Asimov. I'm a little surprised.

Seems a trifle mordant for him.

As I'm not much of a science fiction buff, he would have been my first guess.

Make no mistake, sometimes expertise can cause one to miss the forest for the trees.