“The Dead Past” by Isaac Asimov is story #27 of 52 from The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989), an anthology my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The Dead Past” first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction (April 1956). I can find no ebook or audiobook edition of this story.

Normally, I don’t link to the Internet Archive because I worry it’s going to be taken down. But for “The Dead Past” you can read it here in a scan of the April 1956 Astounding.

Let’s imagine that “The Dead Past” is a robot Isaac Asimov built. This robot has a specific function, to trigger certain ideas and emotions in readers. I believe we can understand this story in terms of the motors and gears Asimov used to design his robot.

1. The first motor is Arnold Potterley, Ph.D., a Professor of Ancient History. Arnold is obsessed with ancient Carthage. He desperately wants to use a time viewer to prove that specific history about Pre-Roman Carthage is untrue, and were lies created by their enemies the Greeks and Romans.
2. The second motor is academic control, as viewed through The Department of Chronoscopy, which has the power to view the past using the science of neutrinics, an area of physics created by a man named Sterbinski.
3. The third motor is Jonas Foster, a new instructor in the physics department.
4. The first gear system is a dystopian society that rigidly controls all academic research. Asimov used this feature to satirize the real-life academic bureaucracy that he had to deal with. Arnold fights against this bureaucracy to get access to the time viewer to do his research. Jonas becomes intrigued with why the bureaucracy suppresses the time viewer. The two men’s motives mess to work together secretly to build their own time viewer.
5. The fourth motor is Caroline Potterley, Arnold’s wife. She is obsessed with the death of their child, Laurel, who died twenty years earlier at age 3. She wants the time viewer to see Laurel again.
6. The second gear system is the mystery of Laurel’s death. Arnold is afraid that if Caroline could see the event he might be blamed. I believe Asimov added this system to his machine because he wanted an emotional component.
7. The fifth motor is Ralph Nimmo, a popular science writer.
8. The third gear system links Ralph and Jonas and allows Asimov to express views on science writers, as well as enable the building of a home time viewer.
9. The sixth motor is Thaddeus Araman, Department Head of the Division of Chronoscopy. He is in charge of suppressing the technology of time viewing for a very specific reason.
10. The last gear is between Arnold, Caroline, Jonas, and Thaddeus. The first three want to view the past, and the last wants to stop them. The why is the revelation of the story.

“The Dead Past” is one of Asimov’s better stories, even a favorite to some. I liked it quite a lot but found it clunky. The driving force behind Arnold is to prove ancient Carthage didn’t practice child sacrifice, and the driving force behind Caroline is to see her dead child again. Jonas is so intrigued by a possible conspiracy theory that he throws over his budding career in physics. I thought all three of these fictional motives were melodramatic. They do work, adding complexity and emotion to a rather dry final idea, but it’s a shame that Asimov didn’t come up with a more sophisticated emotional linkage.

I think Asimov would have shown more finesse if he had foreshadowed the ending. There is a cross-link between Arnold’s and Caroline’s desire to see the past, but neither predicts the real reason why Thaddeus wants to suppress the time viewer. This might be simplistic on my part, but if Arnold, Caroline, and Jonas each had a reason to use the time viewer, and one of their reasons should have foreshadowed the real reason why Thaddeus thought the time viewer was so dangerous. I believe the story would have been tighter if Jonas has wanted to use the time viewer to uncover the conspiracy, and Caroline wanted to use it to spy on Arnold and Jonas.

I don’t think Asimov was a very mature person. From what I’ve read about him, and from reading his stories, he comes across as a rather clever child prodigy who as an adult had trouble comprehending human relationships. This is often reflected in his stories. His fiction focuses on ideas, and his characters are constructed to present those ideas. In “The Dead Past,” Asimov tries harder than usual to present adult emotions, but they come across as contrived. Still, “The Dead Past” is a good example of Asimov trying to overcome his weakness. I give him credit for that.

Two or three years ago I read or reread all of Asimov’s robot stories. They were all hampered by this problem. I could always see how Asimov added human emotion to his stories. When I was young, that effort worked unseen, but as I got older, the stories succeeded in their ideas but felt clunky in their efforts to deal with genuine humans and relationships. In fact, I was sometimes horrified by some of Asimov’s emotional conclusions – but that’s for another essay.

“The Dead Past” is a nicely worked-out science fiction story. Asimov adds psychological depth to a neatly complex plot. Unfortunately, he uses B-movie creativity for creating the psychological drivers of this story.

Finally, regarding “The Dead Past,” I want to make a protest, or maybe a lament. This is my third reading of the story, and this time I wanted to read “The Dead Past” with my eyes, and then listen to it again from an audiobook. But I could find no audiobook edition. Nor could I find an ebook edition. This annoyed and depressed me. “The Dead Past” is one of Asimov’s best works of short fiction. You can find it in print in The Complete Stories, Volume 1. There are US and UK versions on Amazon, but they don’t have the same number of pages, so I don’t know which to recommend. However, used copies of the US edition are quite common and much cheaper.

I now prefer consuming fiction via ebooks and audiobooks. I hate that Asimov’s short fiction, as well as other science fiction writers’ short fiction, is either not available or is no longer available in these formats. A friend eventually found an epub version for me to read, and that visually easier-to-read format made reading the story far more enjoyable.

I recently noticed that all English language versions of Brian W. Aldiss audiobooks have been pulled from Audible. Classic old science fiction is slowly disappearing. There’s still plenty to buy and read, but it’s disappearing at the edges. I hate that.

James Wallace Harris, 7/6/23

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