4 - Sunday, April 26, 1992 — North Shore News Escaping earthly realities with Asimov MANY YEARS ago, I had a collection of science fiction that was considered the second largest in all of Western Canada. I was a member of the Western Canadian Science Fiction Club — the youngest, as a matter of fact — so this is no idle claim. I was deeply, totally, fanatically into science fiction. I credit science fiction with get- iing me through the worst teenage years, which happened to be the °50s, a time when air-raid drills in case of an atomic bomb attack were routine. “Escapism,’’ I was told sternly, “isn't the answer.”’ Maybe not, but to me escapism was the next best thing to actually escaping. Earth in the ’50s looked like a good planet to get the hell away from before the dominant life form blew it to smithereens, Needless to say, one of my very favorite sci-fi writers was Isaac Asimov. To enter into the worlds he so vividly conjured was a kind of yoga, an out-of-body experience. The earthside tensions of the Cold War were something to be left far, far behind. And it wasn’t just the galaxy that opened up to readers of Asimov's prose, it was also a tomorrow that was further ahead up the road of time than anybody except a handful of literary pio- neers had ventured before. At the end of The Time Machine, H.G. Wells had zipped ahead to the last days of Earth, _ and in Against The Fall Of Night, Arthur C. Clarke had portrayed a dune-covered planet where hu- manity had buried itself alive in one last enclosed city, bur the stars were distant and the history of the galaxy was a mystery, as ever. Prior to Asimov, E.E. ‘‘Doc”’ Smith had spun a millenia- and galaxy-straddling epic with his magnificent Lensman Series, and Olaf Stapleton had constructed : the mighty Last and First Men sci-fi history of the future, but AM Bob Hunter STRICTLY PERSONAL nobody until Asimov had manag- ed to put characters you could relate to as real human beings out there in the vastness. This, I think, was his achieve- ment every bit as much as the creation of convincing fantasy universes. When I heard that my hero had died, I went to the bookshelves and dug out the 13 paperbacks that are all I have left of the 45 or 50 Asimov volumes | owned at one time. While still a young, foolish and seriously confused man, you see, | idiotically gave away my enor- mous sci-fi collection in the mis- taken belief that I would “grow up”’ if I did. Ha! In retrospect, I! can see that reading science fiction was an ex- cellent way of reaily growing up — that is, shedding your narrow. little cultural, nationalistic and even speciocentric prejudices. Science fiction makes you look at humans in their actual context, which isn’t a neighborhood, coun- try or even “the world.’’ Rather, it is a fantastic galaxy teeming with bizarre and astoun- HOME- WOKOUR HONE EVENT. Avo Yo He Sone FoR Ho To. Everything for your home at some of our best prices of the year. You'll find it in our new Home Event flyer and at our Home Event sale - furniture, bedding, appliances, accessories and much more, plus our Mother's Day Insert. Sale starts April 29th. Be sure to visit our Colourful California Awaits event, on now. WOOBWARDS ~ $0 Moen To CHepaat Cresaatt Put it on your Woodward's card ding forms of sentient life scat- tered across worlds without end. Such is science fiction’s central paradigm. Science fiction was truly mind- expanding, even mind-altering, long before these terms were in- vented, let alone before psychedelia arrived. Accounts of LSD experiences in the ’60s frequently described spacey, alien-inhabited inner realms, suggesting that a lot of people’s minds had been science- fictionized, so to speak, long be- fore they took drugs. The “‘trips”’ sci-fi writers took us on were nothing more than ex- plorations of possibility, but the act of thinking and using our imaginations can change us almost as much as experience itself. Someone who can dream of other worlds is like the one-eyed person in the land of the cognitively impaired. As with drugs, there are side- effects. To see Earth not just from the moon, as our astronauts and cameras have done, but from the vantage point of 12,000 years in the future, looking back from a planet called Trantor, with the memory of humanity’s home world lost in myth and legend, now that’s perspective! Of course the legendary Foun- dation series comes to mind as Asimov's greatest contribution to the expansion of the human imag- ination, but two of the closest runners-up in this department, I would say, happen to be other Asimov literary artifacts as well: the Robot series, starting with the classic I Robot, and Galactic Em- pire series, which began with The Stars Like Dust, and continued on through The Currents of Space and Pebble In The Sky. I can recall standing in a drug store in 1952, gazing hungrily at an Ace Double paperback titled The 1,000-Year Plan. In later editions, the publishers would go back to Asimov's origi- - nal title, Foundation. But for me, the idea of a Galactic Empire whose decay was so far gone its collapse couldn’t be halted spoke reams about the world that seemed to be heading for oblivion around me. Asa minor footnote to history, some two decades afterwards when an organization called Greenpeace was being invented, somebody asked me what we should call it, and I suggested the Greenpeace Foundation, in honor of Asimov’s great idea of setting up a Foundation “at the opposite end of the galaxy” to create a new empire out of the ruins of the old. The idea wasn't to halt the co!- lapse of the dying empire — psychohistorian Hari Seidon had calculated that this was impossi- ble. The only hope was to shorten the expected Dark Age from 30,000 years to a mere millenium. Given the state of the little old planet Earth’s ecosystem, as it collapses under the repeated blows of rampant industrialism, it seem- ed to be that the most we could seriously hope to achieve was something along these lines. The fall of the empire — the Industrial Empire — was some- thing inevitable . Asimov will be read probably forever, and remembered for a lot _. of things. Greenpeace, now that it" is an international! organization, no longer describes itself as a “*foundation.”’ A pity. Anyway, thanis Isaac, May 3 you . reincarnate as a robot detective - during the heyday of the Second Galactic Emrire. | Mail Your Income Tax Return The First 100 Customers to come in after 8:00 pm on April 30 mail their income tax return for FREE! {up to 84¢ value) Postal Services Open until Midnight on April 30.