Many people consider Isaac Asimov to be a classic science fiction writer, perhaps even a great one. The panegyric may have some rough edges balancing itself on the fence, but yesterday retrieved in my memory the huge impact his Foundation Trilogy and works like "Nightfall" had on my psyche. Isaac's work, in other words, planted the seeds of my pessimism about our species. The classic tale can also serve as an analogy for what Hitchens wrote in one of his last reviews about the 20th century being the age, and tragedy, of the absolute idea. Nightfall is undoubtedly a narrative composed during the second global war, and its tropes, the clash between data and belief, can just as easily be interpolated to reflect the sense of doom brought on with the rise of National Socialism after the collapse of the aristocratic hierarchy.
What blew the plastic fluidity of my pre-collegiate mind, however, now feels like an overwrought ode to quaint beliefs about mass hysteria. Losing the sense of magic and wonder about existence is not always what it seems.
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