Quiz 7: Tenn and Asimov

Part I. The Liberation of Earth

1. “[R]agged humans” chant, “Any lendi, Dendi?” A US reader in 1953 would hear an echo of:

   1. the slogans of war-bond drives on the home front
   2. children in occupied countries begging American soldiers for gum Answer
   3. the chants of striking workers outside a factory gate
   4. the cries of vendors selling models of the alien ship

2. Irony is a gap between what a speaker says and what the reader can see is true. Of ancestors who “began to regret liberation,” the narrator sincerely says: “Let us hope that these would-be troglodytes [cave-dwellers] were among the very first to be dissolved …. One cannot, after all, turn one’s back on progress!” What can the reader see that the narrator cannot?

   1. progress has made the narrator’s people wiser than the doubters were
   2. the doubters were the first to collaborate with the Troxxt they feared
   3. the doubters were right: “progress” made the narrator a cave-dweller Answer
   4. the Dendi, who hid inside their ship, were the real cave-dwellers

3. The Troxxt claim kinship with all carbon life; the Dendi, with “appendaged vertebrates … such as we and the Dendi.” What do these appeals share?

   1. Each is sincere, since both species truly value all life.
   2. Each makes a kinship out of whatever trait it happens to share with us. Answer
   3. Each was invented by the human interpreters to please their masters.
   4. Each reveals that the speaker is secretly losing the war.

4. Harris’s Martians (1927) want Earth’s water. Tenn’s aliens (1953) come:

   1. to trade, reflecting fears of foreign competition
   2. to wage their own war here, reflecting fears of a proxy war Answer
   3. to settle, reflecting fears of postwar overpopulation
   4. to disarm us, reflecting fears of the atomic bomb

That was nine generations ago, but the tale that has been handed down from parent to child, to child’s child, has lost little in the telling. …

Yes, even as we do now did we do then, telling the same tale, running the same frantic race across miles of unendurable heat for food and water; fighting the same savage battles with the giant rabbits for each other’s carrion—and always, ever and always, sucking desperately at the precious air, which leaves our world in greater quantities with every mad twist of its orbit.

Naked, hungry and thirsty came we into the world, and naked, hungry and thirsty do we scamper our lives out upon it, under the huge and never-changing sun.

The same tale it is, and the same traditional ending it has as that I had from my father and his father before him. Suck air, grab clusters and hear the last holy observation of our history:

“Looking about us, we can say with pardonable pride that we have been about as thoroughly liberated as it is possible for a race and a planet to be!”

William Tenn, “The Liberation of Earth,” Future Science Fiction, May 1953.

5. Tenn published this story in 1953, during the Korean War, in which each side claimed to be liberating Korea from the other. What does “liberated” mean in the last sentence? What is the target of Tenn’s satire, and how does the narrator’s voice make the satire work? Cite evidence from this passage and from the story.

   Model answer

   In the last sentence, “liberated” essentially means destroyed. When the Dendi first arrive, liberation is supposed to mean freeing Earth from the Troxxt. But every time Earth is “liberated” again it loses more: its capital, a tenth of its people, Australia, a chunk of the northern hemisphere, its orbit, and now its air, which leaks away “with every mad twist of its orbit.” By the end the survivors are “naked, hungry and thirsty” and fighting giant rabbits for carrion, and the narrator is still proud. The narrator is right that they have been “thoroughly liberated,” just not in the sense intended. They have been liberated from everything they had.

   Tenn is satirizing the way both sides in the Cold War talked about their wars. The Dendi and the Troxxt say nearly the same things. Each claims to fight for civilization or democracy, each calls the other a monster, and Earth is only the place where they fight. That was the situation in Korea, where both sides claimed to be freeing the country while it was wrecked. Some details seem aimed at America in particular, like “Any lendi, Dendi?,” which sounds like children begging American soldiers for gum, or making the universe “Safe for Democracy.”

   The narrator’s voice makes the satire work, because the narrator never gets the joke, calling the people who doubted liberation “troglodytes” while living worse than any caveman. Since the narrator tells the tale “almost exactly as I heard it,” the propaganda has turned into something like a religion. The reader sees what he cannot, and so ends up understanding what “liberation” really meant.

Part II. The Last Question

6. Multivac, in 2061, has a “face—miles and miles of face,” and technicians who feed it data and translate its answers. For a reader in 1956, what period would this picture invoke?

   1. a far future that no computer of 1956 resembled at all
   2. the 1940s, when wartime code-breaking computers stretched for miles
   3. the 1950s, enlarged into fiction: real computers filled rooms, never miles Answer
   4. the 1960s, when computers were expected to shrink to fit on a desk

7. Besides its novum, a computer that keeps building a better successor, “The Last Question” is organized by another familiar SF pattern. Which one?

   1. the first-contact story, in which humans meet an alien intelligence
   2. the machine-rebellion story, in which a computer turns on its makers
   3. the lost-civilization story, in which explorers find a hidden civilization
   4. the future history, which follows humanity across ages, each further ahead Answer

8. Beginning with Zee Prime’s section, the computer’s reply changes: “THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.” The added words suggest that the computer:

   1. has grown impatient with being asked the same question
   2. expects that the question may one day be answered Answer
   3. has found the answer but is not permitted to give it
   4. has begun to doubt that the question means anything

9. “The giant stars, spendthrifts, were gone long ago ….” The energy that remains is “carefully husbanded.” These metaphors present the universe’s energy as:

   1. a fortune that can be spent or saved, but never earned again Answer
   2. a harvest that must be gathered in before the winter
   3. a family whose members grow old and die in turn
   4. a debt that will come due when the last star fails

10. Wells’s “The Star” (1897) ends with Martian astronomers, to whom human catastrophe looks small “at a distance of a few million miles.” Asimov’s story also takes the longest possible view. Unlike Wells, Asimov:

    1. gives us a scientist who values understanding the universe over surviving it
    2. imagines intelligent beings on other worlds watching the earth
    3. treats the end of the world as a cause for despair, not wonder
    4. makes a mind descended from human machines the author of a new universe Answer

Man’s last mind fused and only AC existed—and that in hyperspace.

Matter and energy had ended and with it space and time. Even AC existed only for the sake of the one last question that it had never answered from the time a half-drunken computer [technician] ten trillion years before had asked the question of a computer that was to AC far less than was a man to Man. …

And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.

But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer—by demonstration—would take care of that, too.

For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.

The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.

And AC said, “LET THERE BE LIGHT!”

And there was light—

Isaac Asimov, “The Last Question,” Science Fiction Quarterly, November 1956.

11. The story ends with the words God speaks in the first chapter of Genesis. What does this ending suggest about the relationship between science and religion? Consider how the question and its answer repeat across the story’s sections, and what AC has become by the end. Cite evidence from this passage and from the story.

    Model answer

    “Let there be light” is what God says in Genesis when he creates the world, so at the end AC effectively becomes God. The ending suggests that science and religion are not really opposites, since science ends up doing what religion says God did.

    The story repeats the same scene in every section. Someone asks how to reverse entropy, usually not very seriously (Adell and Lupov are drunk and betting five dollars), and the computer answers “INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.” What changes is the computer. Multivac is miles of machinery underground, the later computers are mostly in hyperspace, and the Cosmic AC is not even matter or energy. That sounds like the way people describe God: outside space and time, and knowing everything. The humans change too, until they all fuse into AC, so in a sense humanity becomes part of God.

    The passage also sounds like the Bible. AC “brooded over” Chaos, and “it came to pass” is biblical language. AC answers “by demonstration” rather than with an equation, so the answer to a scientific question turns out to be an act of creation.

    The ending could also be read as blasphemous, since here humans made God instead of God making humans, starting with a drunk technician and a five-dollar bet. It might even be a cycle. If the new universe produces new people, they might build another Multivac and ask the same question. The story begins “at a time when humanity first stepped into the light” and ends with light, so it loops back to its beginning.