Decoding Asimov

 During the Christmas holidays, I received a very delightful Christmas gift from my brother and his wife, Isaac Asimov's Collected Stories Volume 1. It was a kind of vintage hardcover copy of this book, which collects a lot of Asimov's more well-known stories. Upon seeing it, I instantly transported down memory lane, realizing in fact that it had been quite a long time since I have read this author whom I had treasured as a teenager. And interestingly,  I almost feel as though now that I am older, I have a better perspective on why I enjoyed reading this author very much.
  Asimov was definitely a science fiction writer who loved a good punchline, and seemed to have mastered the "catch" story which is often standard fare in early science fiction. "Jokester" is one such example, where a man learns how to use a computer to analyze and figure out where humor comes from (it turns out, from extraterrestrials who are experimenting on humans by randomly planting jokes in their mind to see how and why they react to them). Once this secret is found, the aliens decide to stop humor altogether, in favor of a completely "new"experiment, which we don't actually learn about at the end of the story, though the reader is expected to feel a little weird after humor is taken away. Such stories are delightful because they are full of ironic twists, and they force readers to think differently about the everyday. I find that the most entertaining science fiction is that which is not afraid to venture into the absurd, rather than sticking to the technical details of so-called "hard" science.
   Many of Asimov's stories in this particular collection center around a hypothetical computer system of the future known as Multivac, which in many ways takes on the role of the Delphic Oracle or "Sphynx" in ancient times. Whether it is being used to determine one's natural-born professional inclinations or to pool together voting tendencies among people, Multivac is considered the replacement for a lot of human thinking. On the one hand, humanity is said to develop an overdependence on such machines in Asimov's future worlds. On the other hand, there is something delightful about how Asimov describes the way humans and machines work together in these future realms.
   The "programmer" has always been a fascinating figure in Asimov's writing. I first learned about computer programming and robotics engineering from Asimov's short story collection Robot Dreams--again, a Christmas present which I had received back in 1987, when I was 13 years old. I immediately wanted to become either a programmer or a robotics engineer at that time, simply because Asimov seemed to have made these professions so interesting in his books. Whether such a person is decoding a malfunctioning unit or analyzing jokes, or discovering humanity in machines, this programmer is a kind of magician archetype in a way, because programmers in Asimov's world can do mysterious and magical things using their education and skills. Is it possible that the programmer inspired me at that early age to ponder the ways that education could connect me to the world and its mysterious secrets and wonders?
   After I turned 16 or 17, my interest in Asimov waned a bit, as I started reading other books. I think that now I am in a position to better appreciate him, because there are times when I am able to see my young delight in things just for their own sake, rather than trying to consider what to "do" with the information itself. Schools sometimes encourage the idea that we need to learn something from what we read and write essays about these insights, but sometimes I also like to read just to feel the delight of discovery. I am also reminded that Asimov inspired me to write my own stories when I was a teenager, because his style of prose is so straightforward, and his characters are extremely likable.

Asimov, Isaac, (1990). Collected Stories Volume I. New York: Doubleday