Lately, I've been looking back at some old science fiction stories [
1][
2] and for this blog post I'm going to comment on "Mother Earth" by
Isaac Asimov as published in
Astounding, May 1949... 70 years ago. This particular Asimov story is relevant today because it deals with topics such as immigration quotas.
"...
a good deal of futile emotion is sweeping Earth on the immigration question." -Isaac Asimov, 1949
"Mother Earth" is also about robots and artificial intelligence. "
Feminine Intuition", set in the year 2060, dealt with the problem of finding a habitable exoplanet near Earth. As described in "Mother Earth", the first settled exoplanet was called Aurora. By the year
3720, the cultures of Earth and Aurora had been diverging for more than a thousand years.
 |
| Teleconference on Aurora; interior artwork by Paul Orban |
Asimov imagined Aurora as a planet with only 75 million human residents, not living in cities, but rather, on widely-spread homesteads, with one's nearest neighbor being miles away. The residents of Aurora were linked by a video telecommunications network, and each homestead was essentially self-sufficient, with a large number of robotic servants to do all the manual labor, such as bringing the master a cigarette.
Star Wars
But, you say: "Those Aurorans don't have such a good life, they probably spend all their free time fighting off aliens in endless star wars." Not so. "Mother Earth" is set in Asimov's "all human galaxy". There are no aliens. The war that must be fought is between the colony worlds like Aurora and Earth. What do they have to fight about?
I must state clearly at this point that I despise fictional politics. Asimov creates two political factions for the "Outer Worlds" (what he would later call the "Spacers"), Conservatives and Independents. In the lead-up to war, some of the Independents refer to Earthlings as "half-humans" (actually, "half-apes" is the epithet).
 |
| from "Mother Earth", 1949 |
In "Mother Earth", the Earthlings lament the racist policies of the anti-imigration Independents, who want only the healthy, tall, fair-haired people of Earth to move to the Space worlds.
As depicted by Asimov, Earth has
BIG problems. Here today (world population almost 8 billion) it is hard to get into Asimov's mind-set of 1949. He frets over the fact that in the year 3720, Earth's population is 6 billion. Food is running short and some government officials believe that the "only solution" is for Earthlings to emigrate to the Spacer worlds. It is a crisis! The sky is falling! etc etc
Asimov depicts the Spacers as being very advanced in physical science, but Earth is still supreme for life sciences such as psychology. Knowing that war is on the way, the psychologists of Earth goad the Spacers into attacking Earth, creating conditions that will eventually be to Earth's advantage.
 |
The "traitor" who has compassion for Earthlings
is condemned by his fellow Aurorans. |
On Aurora, the one man who has worked with Earth in an attempt to avoid an Earth-Spacer war is treated like a traitor and arrested. He is vilified for having "consorted" with the subhuman Earthlings. Donald Trump was only 3 at the time when "Mother Earth" was printed, but the
xenophobia that Asimov experienced as an immigrant and depicted in his story apparently seeped into Trump's political bones and powered him to victory in 2016.
In the lead-up to Asimov's Star War between Earth and the Spacer Worlds there is a silly trade war. One of the key products from Earth is
tobacco, which despite the superior technology of the Spacers, they cannot replicate on the Spacer Worlds.
The war itself only lasts 3 weeks, just long enough for the technologically-superior Spacer fleet of spaceships to eliminate the inferior fleet from Earth. The Spacers then use their space fleet to establish a WALL around Earth, preventing anyone from Earth leaving the Solar System. The anti-immigration Independents have won their desired victory. The Spacers will never again be troubled by immigrants from Earth.
Later, Asimov wrote additional stories [
3][
4] about the Earth-Spacer conflict in which telepathic robots helped make possible a second wave of exoplanet colonization from Earth. In those later stories, the original Spacers became a dead-end, unable to compete with the second-wave settlers from Earth.
Related Reading:
Emphyrio by Jack Vance, "
Feminine Intuition" by Asimov,
The Robots of Dawn by Asimov
, Robots and Empire by Asimov
, The Caves of Steel by Asimov
. Earth-Space War
Next: The names of the
6 Mind Clones
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