The Dead Past
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| Author | Isaac Asimov |
|---|---|
| Country |  USA |
| Language | English |
| Series | Multivac |
| Genre(s) | science fiction short story |
| Released in | Astounding Science Fiction |
| Publisher | Street & Smith |
| Media Type | Magazine |
| Released | April 1956 |
| Preceded by | Franchise |
| Followed by | Someday |
The Dead Past is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov, first published in the April 1956 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. It was later collected in Earth Is Room Enough (1957) and The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973), and adapted into an episode of the science-fiction television series Out of the Unknown. Its pattern is that of dystopian fiction, but of a subtly nuanced flavour.
[edit] Plot summary
Asimov extrapolates the twin trends towards centralisation of academic research and scientific specialisation, to portray a world in which state control of scientific research is overseen by a vast bureaucracy. Working innocently under these constraints is Arnold Potterley, a professor of ancient history. Potterley, an expert on ancient Carthage, wishes to gain access to the chronoscope, a device which allows direct observation of past events. Pioneered by a neutrino physicist named Sterbinski many years before, the chronoscope is now exclusively controlled by the government. When the government bureaucracy, in the person of bureaucrat Thaddeus Araman, denies Potterley's request that he be granted chronoscope access, Potterley sets in train a clandestine research project to build a chronoscope of his own. Two people assist his quest: a young physics researcher named Jonas Foster and the physicist's uncle, a professional (i.e., unlicensed by the government) science writer, Ralph Nimmo.
As a result of this work, the team makes a series of discoveries. First, they learn that the government has been suppressing research into chronoscopy; nevertheless, Foster invents a way to construct a chronoscope that is much more compact and energy-efficient than that of its pioneer inventor. Though this discovery delights Potterley, Foster soon proves that no chronoscope can see more than about one hundred and fifty years into the past. In any attempt to observe an earlier time, the inevitable noise totally drowns out the signal. The government's reports of chronoscope observations of earlier years are thus clear fabrications.
Personality conflicts and clashes of motivation cause the team members to fall out with each other. In particular, Potterley, after observing the effect of the prospect of the chronoscope's availability on his wife's obsessive grief for their baby (killed many years before in a house fire), alerts the authorities and accepts the blame. His associate, Foster, now in the grip of intellectual pride and zeal for the cause of free inquiry, attempts to publish his breakthrough but is suddenly and unexpectedly apprehended by Thaddeus Araman, the bureaucrat who rejected Potterley's original research request.
As Araman attempts to secure an undertaking from Foster not to persist in publication, Foster's uncle, Nimmo, is brought in. Initially Araman believes that Nimmo has been caught in time, but when it emerges that Nimmo, in an attempt to preserve his nephew's professional credentials, has taken the odium of publication upon himself, Araman has no alternative but the declare the government's hand. He reveals that Foster has been apprehended though the government's own use of the chronoscope in snooping on the plotters, and that, by ending government secrecy, the protagonists have created a world in which personal privacy has been completely destroyed.
Araman reveals that the government chronoscopy agency, far from suppressing scientific research out of mere sadistic pleasure, was trying to protect the people in the only way they knew how. As Foster and Potterley have learned, the chronoscope is inherently limited to recent times—but what if, instead of focusing it upon the past of a generation earlier, it were tuned to the past of one-hundredth of a second ago? The dead past, Araman says, is only a synonym for "the living present". If the plans for a chronoscope, particularly Foster's new and improved version, ever reached the general public the resulting plague of voyeurism would reduce human civilization to a "goldfish bowl". Even the government workers now assigned to the chronoscope, Araman says, sometimes transgress regulations and use it to spy for personal purposes.
The story's twist—that the man from the government really was there to help—qualifies the idea that a world of directed research really constitutes a dystopia. Asimov's thesis, revealed in the final scene, is that central control of scientific research is not necessarily immoral, but that in the long run, it may be impossible after all. The character of Thaddeus Araman is a recognisable dystopian spokesman in the mould of Beatty in Fahrenheit 451 and Mustapha Mond in Brave New World, both of whom also acknowledge the limitations of their societies' control mechanisms.
[edit] Story notes
- In his autobiography In Memory Yet Green, Asimov writes, "The story, one of my favorites, is most memorable to me for what I put in it accidentally. What I was planning was a story that inverted the usual assumption that government planning is tyrannical and that freedom of scientific inquiry is good. In the course of the story, however, I threw in, almost at random, a reference to Carthage that somehow took on a life of its own and quiet unexpectedly introduced a subplot that provided the whole course of the story with excellent motivation. Any critic reading the story is bound to conclude I planned that subplot from the beginning, though I swear I didn't."
- The name Araman is similar to the character in the story The Last Trump, "R.E. Mann" who is actually Ahriman, a Persian name for Satan.
- Asimov injects a small note of humor in this otherwise grim story. When Araman threatens Foster with summary imprisonment, Foster responds "Oh no, you're bluffing. This is not the twentieth century, you know." When Nimmo appears and is similarly threatened there is the following exchange:
- Nimmo : Nuts! This isn't the twentieth cent—
- Foster: I tried that. It doesn't bother him.
- The Asimov festschrift Foundation's Friends includes a sequel to "The Dead Past" by Barry N. Malzberg called "The Present Eternal".
[edit] See also
- The Light of Other Days, in which wormhole technology is shown to have much the same consequences as the chronoscope
- Paycheck, a short story by Philip K. Dick first published in 1953 (three years before The Dead Past), about a machine which views the future.
| The Best of Isaac Asimov |
| Marooned Off Vesta | Nightfall | C-Chute | The Martian Way | The Deep | The Fun They Had | The Last Question | The Dead Past | The Dying Night | Anniversary | The Billiard Ball | Mirror Image |
