The story is constructed in a workmanlike fashion. ‘Nightfall’ is the most famous and well-written of these men-as-robots type tales, due to the hand of Campbell adding some poetical purple prose to the climax, in a fashion notably uncharacteristic of Asimov’s dry, dull wont.
The point of all such stories is to persuade the unwary teen reader that the customs and traditions of our own culture are equally arbitrary and irrational. We see this motif in his novels CAVES OF STEEL and THE NAKED SUN, as well as his short stories ‘Strikebreaker’ and ‘It’s Such A Beautiful Day’, where things neurotic in our upbringing, agoraphobia, claustrophobia, haphephobia, cloacaphobia, are portrayed as perfectly normal, or, at least, tragically invincible, in cultures dominated by, let us say, overpopulation, teleportation, robotics or waste-recycling. The idea that men uphold the ideas upbringing but not truth compels, if true, is an idea that itself is upheld due to compulsion, not truth.
That this idea is illogical is never addressed in any story. There is a recurring materialist motif in Asimov’s fiction, namely, that men are ‘blank-slate’ creatures with no nature, or, rather, their nature is infinitely malleable, and can be established, or, rather, programmed, by environment and upbringing to conform to any arbitrary standard. Nor have I been curious: any additional material would be grossly deleterious to the point of the yarn.) (I have been warned away from reading the novelization, which I have not. The story is brief, as befits the sharp and short blasphemous joke. ‘Nightfall’ is Isaac Asimov’s most famous short story, and the one which catapulted him to fame.Īccording to Asimov’s autobiography, Campbell asked Asimov to write the story after discussing with him a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson: If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!Ĭampbell disagreed, and instead scoffed: “I think men would go mad.”
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