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Isaac Asimov
Otherwordly ... Isaac Asimov with a photo of the Earth from space. Photograph: Douglas Kirkland/Corbis
Otherwordly ... Isaac Asimov with a photo of the Earth from space. Photograph: Douglas Kirkland/Corbis

Back to the Hugos: The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov

This article is more than 13 years old
He may not have been much bothered about his prose style, but this novel repays the attention you'll be hard pressed not to give it

Isaac Asimov was a remarkable man. As well as writing more than 500 books, he somehow managed to work full time as a biochemist at Boston University, produce numerous film scripts and treatments and, incidentally, coin the word "robotics" (though the Capek brothers might feel their thunder slightly embezzled by this). His ability to churn out such an astonishing amount of material could in part be ascribed to his claim never to read drafts of his work before filing them – but much as I'd like to provoke a firestorm by trying to claim that Asimov was a hack, I can't.

The author of I, Robot fully deserves his place alongside Arthur C Clarke and Robert Heinlein in the pantheon of the mid-20th century SF Golden Age. His long absence from the Hugo best-novel roster (he didn't win the award until The Gods Themselves came along in 1973, and he was well into his 50s) becomes more understandable when we remember that many of his 1950s novels were part of an ongoing series – and the surprising fact that, prolific as he may have been, he only wrote four novels between 1958 and 1983 (when he won it again). If The Gods Themselves is anything to go by, he must have been waiting until he had something pretty unique to say.

Just how unusual the book is going to be doesn't emerge in the first 50 or so pages. The first of the novel's three sections was given the unappealing label "laboratory thriller" in the Guardian's 1973 review of the book. It details the attempt of Lamont, a self-obsessed scientist, makes to undermine Hallam, a yet-more-maniacal egotist, who claims to have found the answer to all mankind's energy problems. Lamont sets about this hatchet job by proving that Hallam's new energy source (a "positron pump", which relies on the transfer of radioactive material and, incidentally, physical laws, from a parallel universe) is actually going to destroy the earth. But the title of the book – taken from Friedrich Schiller's dictum that "against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain" – is borne out. Lamont rails and no one believes him. The last words we hear from him are: "No one on earth will live to know I was right."

OK, as that last quotation might suggest, the writing isn't exactly subtle. But Asimov still offers an amusingly fraught portrayal of academic bitchiness while the earth-about-to-explode scenario provides a good bit of reason to read on. And it's the next section of the book that really adds another dimension. Here, Asimov takes us into the parallel universe that's supplying all that free energy. On an unmanned planet, the local residents absorb all their sustenance from a cooling sun and appear to exist in two forms known as "soft ones" and "hard ones". And if the nomenclature gets your ooh-matron sensor pinging, you'll be pleased to learn that there are long passages given over not only to the mating habits of these aliens, but also their auto-erotic proclivities. It's a testament to Asimov's matter-of-fact writing style that all this is no more embarrassing than the average David Attenborough documentary. Indeed, he also shares the great naturalist's good-natured curiosity, so there's real fun and fascination to these descriptions of a new world.

Again, no one is going to accuse Asimov of subtlety here. There's an especially heavy-footed reference to the id, ego and super ego in the three separate parts into which Asimov divides his "soft ones". But who needs subtlety when, once again, the end of the world is still on the horizon and Asimov is able to cap the section with one of the best twists in SF?

He keeps the action buzzing in part three, which takes us back to our own universe and a moon station where the fight is on to counter stupidity and the ill effects of the positron pump. Once more it's possible to take pot shots. "The whole thing depends on subtle factors of quark-quark interactions," we are told at one point, and those without a strong interest in theoretical physics will find some of the science baffling. Human sexuality also seems to present Asimov with greater problems than alien. The author (who, let's not forget, also wrote a tome called The Sensuous Dirty Old Man) is delighted to inform us that there are lots of "bare-breasted women" out on the moon and one of the key characters is an object of grubby-handed fascination for him. Once more, though, it seems churlish to complain when so many provocative ideas flow out of Asimov; when so much of the book is such an effective and prophetic metaphor for our times. Swap the positron pump for global warming and Asmiov's contest against stupidity seems ever more urgent.

Next time: Rendezvous With Rama – Arthur C Clarke

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