Stumbling out from beneath
the 45-tonne bronze cone of London's planetarium,
unsteady from a virtual voyage through the solar system and beyond, you
can picture the earth turning beneath your feet. Stand there on the
brow of the hill in Greenwich Park, your head still full of planets
spinning on their computer-generated orbits, with
the National Maritime Museum, the curve of the river, Canary Wharf
and all the city stretched out beneath you, and the vista seems to roll
inexorably east towards the curtain of night. Darkness is an
inescapable fact of life on earth, an astronomical certainty which, for
all the terror it brings in childhood, gives our daily existence its
rise and fall, its ebb and flow, as night follows day follows night.
But
what if it wasn't like that? What if night were not only dense and
all-encompassing, but also sudden and unexpected? What if daylight were
so pervasive, so constant, that total darkness was unimaginable,
inconceivable? What if there were no one
to teach us how not to be afraid of the dark?
In
his 1941 short story "Nightfall",
Isaac Asimov
takes us to Lagash, a planet deep in a globular cluster surrounded by
not one, not two, not three – but six nearby stars. When Alpha sets,
Beta is at zenith; when Gamma is at aphelion, Delta is near. The whole
planet is bathed in perpetual sunlight from its constant companions, so
that the inhabitants of Saro City have never seen the stars, have never
known the total darkness of night. Until now.
The story
opens at Saro University on the eve of the first night in 2049 years, as
a rare alignment of stars and planets is set to send half the world
into darkness for "well over half a day". As Gamma sets, leaving only
blood-red Beta hanging in the skies, the scientists who have predicted
the eclipse which will plunge the world into chaos are preparing their
instruments and attempting to master their rising panic.
"Imagine
darkness – everywhere. No light, as far as you can see. The houses, the
trees, the fields, the earth, the sky – black! And stars thrown in, for
all I know – whatever they are. Can you conceive it?"
"Yes, I can," declared Theremon truculently.
And
Sheerin slammed his fist down upon the table in sudden passion. "You
lie! You can't conceive that. Your brain wasn't built for the conception
any more than it was built for the conception of infinity or of
eternity. You can only talk about it. A fraction of the reality upsets
you, and when the real thing comes, your brain is going to be presented
with the phenomenon outside its limits of comprehension. You will go
mad, completely and permanently! There is no question of it!"
According to Asimov, the idea came from discussing a quotation from the opening of
Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay, Nature with the editor of
Astounding Science Fiction,
John W Campbell Jr. "If the stars should appear one night in a thousand
years," suggested Emerson, "how would men believe and adore, and
preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which
had been shown!" It seemed much more likely to Asimov that the sudden
majesty of the heavens would inspire fear instead of wonder. After two
millennia of constant sunshine on Lagash, the terror of complete
darkness, the "soul-searing splendour" of the mysterious stars, is
enough to send the citizens mad, to consume civilisations in the hungry
flicker of the only means to hand for making light: fire.
Asimov
answers Emerson's transcendentalism by setting up an opposition between
the scientists (good), struggling to understand celestial mechanics
without being able to see much in the way of heavens, and the Cultists
(bad) whose Book of Revelations, woven from "the confused incoherent
babblings of half-mad morons", foretells a cave which will devour Lagash
and send down heavenly fire to rob men of their souls. Will the
astronomical truths discovered at Saro University survive the apocalypse
and enlighten the survivors of the next cycle, or will the obscurantism
of religion prevail? It's a confrontation that reads all the more
urgently now, 70 years on, as climate scientists struggle to make their
warnings of catastrophe heard above the voices of the deniers.
While
the names with numbers – Beenay 25, Aton 77 – the lack of women and an
honourable reporter who declines the chance to scarper when things get
hairy ("I'm a newspaperman and I've been assigned to cover a story. I
intend covering it.") give "Nightfall" something of a period feel,
Asimov's ability to think himself into the dread his sun-soaked
characters feel at the approaching gloom, their delight at the unveiling
of Saro University's latest developments in light-emitting technology
still rings true. But he's even better at imagining just how far the
universe can exceed our expectations.
One of the younger
astronomers brings up the purely theoretical case of life on a planet
with only one sun, a planet where "the exact nature of the gravitational
force would be so evident" astronomers would discover it "before they
even invented the telescope". It's a "pretty abstraction", but only of
philosophical importance, he continues: "life would be impossible on
such a planet. It wouldn't get enough heat and light, and if it rotated
there would be total darkness half of each day. You couldn't expect life
– which is fundamentally dependent on light – to develop under those
conditions." He also dares to suggest the fantastical notion that the
stars spoken of in the Book of Revelations might simply be "other suns
in the universe", far enough away to be invisible during Lagash's
perpetual day, to leave the complicated gravitational dance of its six
companion stars unperturbed. Maybe there might even be as many as "a
dozen or two".
It is this kind of of mind-stretching
celestial inversion which made "Nightfall" an instant classic. Campbell
upped the 21-year-old Asimov's fee to a princely 1.25 cents a word and
gave him the cover. "I was suddenly taken seriously," Asimov says, "and the science
fiction world became aware that I existed." The
science fiction
world had shifted, had rolled inexorably on, powered by one of those
great stories which – like the great science that underpins it – can
make the planet move under your feet.
