Nightfall

Born in 1920, Isaac Asimov is one of the most preeminent writers of science fiction, identified alongside Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein as one of the Big Three authors in the genre. He is best known for Foundation, a seven-book series that concerns the collapse of a galaxy-spanning empire. The narrative concerns that would dominate the Foundation novels can be seen in his 1941 story, “Nightfall,” which also revolves around the collapse of a planetary civilization after an inevitable yet natural cataclysmic event. Asimov was also known for his work as a writer of popular science books, leveraging his educational expertise as a chemist to produce several nonfiction guides on topics such as atoms and elements. Other books enabled Asimov to demonstrate his strength as a generalist, such as the 1960 guide The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science. His mastery of the sciences seeped across genres into fiction. In “Nightfall,” he writes eloquently about the conditions that would allow a six-sun planet to fall into complete darkness after living in perpetual daylight for so long. Nightfall expands the narrative of “Nightfall” by applying a multi-disciplinary approach to the phenomenon of darkness and the appearance of the stars, examining its causes and effects from the perspectives of astronomy, archaeology, and psychology.

In 1988, a friend had given Asimov the idea to expand one of his classic stories into a novel-length work. He suggested that Robert Silverberg, a younger science fiction writer who was born in 1935 and had published stories since 1954, could work with Asimov to provide “Nightfall” with a detailed beginning and ending. Asimov accepted the idea when he realized that the publication of a novel based on “Nightfall” would give him more time to write the seventh Foundation novel, Forward the Foundation. Silverberg was given the room to expand and modify the story using parameters that Asimov had given him. However, Asimov had the final say on authorial decisions, ultimately cutting changes out if he felt they were not aligned with the spirit of the story. Thanks to the success of their initial collaboration, Silverberg was contracted to work together with Asimov in expanding two other stories into novels—the 1958 story “The Ugly Little Boy,” which became the 1992 novel Child of Time, followed by the 1976 novella The Bicentennial Man, which became The Positronic Man, also published in 1992.