The episodes are given variety through their uniqueness, but theme and connection through the repeated question and answer. Seven: the computer starts the process all over again after solving the question. Six: Man's minds fuse with the computer, transfer their consciousnesses as the galaxies end, in stasis bodies die off of heat-death. Five: Man is now a unified consciousness, floating outside of the bodies in stasis, still unable to solve the repeating ultimate question, and realizing it as an imminent whole for the first time. Four: humans are still tied down to matter via bodies in immortal stasis, but their consciousnesses roam the almost overpopulated universe free of their body, as two explorers seeking newness only for their own pleasure run into each other and converse philosophically. Three: humans can now harness sun power and they have almost overpopulated the Milky Way, while two people try to assemble a political report to a committee. Two: a human family emigrating to another star in the Milky Way arrives at their destination planet.
One: familiar humans are confined to their own solar system when two computer techs get drunk on a night-watch. Because I think this is so well constructed, I'm going to list all seven episodes and the scene, plot, and revelation about future humanity. It's astoundingly well crafted throughout.ģ. That he was successful clearly shows his immense skill as a storyteller. It's courageous of Asimov to take a nine page short story and further fragment it into seven connected shorter stories over this much time and change. This is a large chunk of time and evolutionary change to bite off in one short story, or seven flash-fictions, but Asimov pulls it off through this structure. But this end is still tinged with familiarity from Biblical creation.
Like in "Nightfall", Asimov starts with the familiar, but then walks off through stages into theoretical post-matter humans and finally to the fantastic realization of a creative god. But each glimpse is a meaningful, important one, packed with ideas of future human evolution that allows the story to expand in the reader's imagination outside of the words on the page.Ģ.
This formulaic, episodic repetition is well done and each episode gives merely a glimpse of the surrounding context. Each is different enough to stay interesting and the whole is short enough to not get repetitively boring. This is a nine page series of seven flash fiction episodes that are repeated cyclical events.
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