You will go mad, completely and permanently! There is no question of it!'Īccording 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. 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. Your brain wasn't built for the conception any more than it was built for the conception of infinity or of eternity.

'Yes, I can,' declared Theremon truculently.Īnd Sheerin slammed his fist down upon the table in sudden passion. The houses, the trees, the fields, the earth, the sky – black! And stars thrown in, for all I know – whatever they are. 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.

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'. 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. When Alpha sets, Beta is at zenith when Gamma is at aphelion, Delta is near. 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. 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.īut 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? 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. 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.

Night fall isaac asimov