Because They Are Hard

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Was President Kennedy a fan of Isaac Asimov? One of Asimov’s constant themes in his robot-and-empire-and-Foundation series is that going into space is good for humanity only if they do it the hard way. Is there an easy way, you ask? Well, in Asimov’s world there is: use robots to do it. They prepare the place, do all the construction, make the new home cushy. Then humans show up and just enjoy and turn soft and live long lives of four-hundred self-absorbed years. It’s a good thing the robots know better, and they arrange to make space travel difficult.

Retirement definitely highlights the question whether hard work is necessary for our well-being. Not that things have been particularly easy since I retired what with death and divorce among those close to me and illness and injury and quarantining affecting me directly. (How do I get through my reading assignments without being able to sit in a Wendy’s or a Chipotle for lunch most days?!) But money isn’t a problem. And I don’t have to deal with students complaining to the Dean when I give them a well-deserved D or problems with administrators who change the D to a C (or an A if they’re especially brazen or a P if they’re particularly cowardly). These are good things, right? In Heaven, there are no complaints about D’s and in fact no D’s awarded. And Heaven is the goal. Right?

And yet I find myself setting myself difficult tasks. I try to program a game just beyond my coding abilities. I try to learn some Japanese and some calculus. I work on a fourth ten-year reading plan. I’m not necessarily succeeding at these tasks, but I think I feel better failing at something hard than I would succeeding at something easy, like reading nothing but Agatha Christie (a definite temptation). Maybe I need to program a robot who will tell me when to do something difficult and when to do something easy. How hard could that be?

Through ripping tales of adventure and intrigue and philosophical debate among robots and humans, Asimov will get you thinking about such things as the human need for difficulty, what privacy means, whether emotions are merely mechanical, why beings with free will tend to act with statistical regularity, and other worthy conundrums. If you want to read his books in in-world chronological order (Asimov wrote three main series of novels and then spent the last years of his life writing books to fill in the gaps and tie the series together), here’s the list. Even if you don’t want to read them in order, here’s the list. I’ve arranged the titles into ten divisions for, I don’t know, maybe a ten-year reading plan.

(1) The End of Eternity, The Complete Robot (includes the I, Robot stories and more)
(2) Caves of Steel, Naked Sun
(3) Robots of Dawn
(4) Robots and Empire
(5) Stars Like Dust, Currents of Space, Pebble in the Sky
(6) Prelude to Foundation
(7) Forward the Foundation, Foundation
(8) Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation
(9) Foundation’s Edge
(10) Foundation and Earth