Little Fish

Here's a really short SF story to read. Go ahead and read it, then read the rest.

Unlike novels, where there's a chance to develop characters, a short story, especially once this short, is about a feeling, a clever idea. You don't know that much about Asteroid McAlmont, except the one crazy idea.

With such a short format, every word counts, and the build up is nearly poetic:

Twenty-five years ago they spotted it, fifteen years ago they plotted it, and five years ago they tried to stop it but the nukes weren't enough.

Everything about its style screams the fifties, from the bizarre hubris of the action, to the choice of sport, to the topic of armageddon, to the use of the word "nuke". It's to take the last thing that would happen to the planet Earth, and juxtapose it with a sport, deciding, in the waning moments, to think of it like a pastime, and go out swinging.

Science fiction, especially good science fiction, nails the idea of the strange and familiar. It comments about the here and now by positing a future where things that will likely never happen, or won't happen anytime soon, happen, and how we, in the here and now, would react to it.

Even if a story is set in the future, the characters seem to harken to now, so that we, the reader, have a reference point to understand who these characters are. They are us, most specifically, for American science fiction, they are Americans of the time the story is written.

Thus, Asimov, writing about a far-flung future, imagines his future worlds populated by visionaries, but really extensions of the well-educated man from the 1940s and 1950s. The thoughts of multi-culturalism, which infected the mindset of authors writing about near-future dystopias in the 1980s, the cyberpunk movement, the near-future prognosticators, was 30 years ahead compared to Asimov at his prime.

The story is then focused on the very big: the extinction of humanity, and the very small, the game of baseball, and putting the two together. It symbolizes, both the small, a crackpot idea to treat this event as if it were some kind of cosmic game being played by some God, and the very large--mankind's desire to want to live, so it can play this game.

It's baseball, after all, on the biggest field possible. And it's not cricket, which emphasizes running, and is utterly foreign to Americans (though, in recent years, not as foreign as it once was, as Indian grad students, with bat and tennis ball in hand, often take to a short stretch of sidewalk to play its national game, far from its shores), but baseball, with its emphasis on the long ball.

And so my review is merely interpretation, and has far exceeded the lucid compactness of the original, but then how could anyone write anything meaningful about something else in a space so short.

Take me out...