He also gained some of the expansion by adding to the story at the beginning and end, and it is only in the last third, dedicated to the after-the-eclipse stuff, that the plot heads off into left field and sails over the fence.

He’s smoothed out the more obvious pulpishness of Asimov’s early style, cleaned up the plot, and granted depth to the characters. Given the ready availability of “ Nightfall” the story, which is much, much better, why bother with the longer and lesser work?Īs a novelization, Silverberg has done a good job, on the whole. The final result is something not as good as Silverberg’s best work-or as good as Asimov’s best.Īnd ultimately, this is the real problem here. Sorry, but that really hurt the novel in my eyes.) Unfortunately, as a member of a religious organization with a well-defined head, I find it totally unbelievable that such an organization could have a bogus head who never makes any kind of personal appearances in the flesh. Silverberg here, of course, is falling perforce victim somewhat to Asimov’s anti-religious bias in his earlier works and so is not entirelyat fault. (Here, by the way, I take particular exception to what’s going on. Isaac Asimovs Nightfall is set in a planet called Lagash that experiences perpetual brightness due to its six suns. Unfortunately, the ending is totally implausible and pretty much violates the development of the novel up to that point-the bad guys end up being good guys in their own perverse fashion, and the chief bad guy ends up being a manipulated and on-existent television image-which really weakens the entire work enormously.

The characters and situation are mildly interesting. The first is as a novel in its own right, and the second is as an expansion of a shorter work.Īs a novel, this is not bad, but neither is it earth-shattering. There are two approaches needed to evaluating the result here. Greenberg is the one who came up with the suggestion to do this, and it was not one of his better ideas. The novelizations were, strictly speaking, done entirely by Robert Silverberg, although he worked with Asimov who supervised and approved what he did. This is the first of three novels made by expanding shorter works by Asimov.

The nightfall by isaac asimov