On a recent trip that came about while my news feed was being bombarded with headlines about escalating conflict and the potential ending of civilizations, I decided to take a short mental break from reading about the current situation by picking up Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall.”
The sci-fi tale is about a fictional planet whose six suns are about to set, plunging the inhabitants into thousands of years of darkness, which scientists predict would drive them to such a level of insanity that they decide to burn down all of civilization.
Rather than distract me from the current goings-on, or enthrall and entertain me with a dystopian mirror to hold up to our own world, I felt the story fell rather flat.
Expectations were high; Asimov is regarded as one of the greatest ever sci-fi writers, and the premise of the story sounded interesting.
But after reaching the end, I felt that the story itself added almost nothing to the premise. Without giving away too many spoilers, the entire plot was outlined in the first few paragraphs, and proceeded exactly as expected.
No captivating twists, no characters with any redeemable or even interesting human features worth mentioning and very little exploration of the fictional world beyond the brief premise that I have outlined here.
Perhaps this is why “Nightfall” was later adapted into a full-length novel in 1990, because writers felt the short story had untapped potential worth expanding on.
Or maybe it is just that “Nightfall” was a product of its time, written in 1941 when fears of the world being plunged into darkness by a total, industrial-scale war were very real. This must have had an influence on Asimov’s writing.
This fear of total destruction still lurks in the background of today’s warfare, but we are living in a very different age, where war is much more random and hard to fathom, with no clear objectives and goalposts changing from day to day.
Science fiction is a way to explore issues faced in the real world through metaphor, without having to stick with the constraints of reality.
While “Nightfall” might have done just that when it was published, I do not think it comes anywhere near to staying relevant now as a work from which we can draw parallels.
