As the story opens, only a single sun is visible in the sky. At the same time, a cult has arisen that believes that a coming darkness that will destroy the world in fire. A group of scientists from a university have made a number of discoveries: ancient civilizations that rise and abruptly fall every 2000 years. The story is set on a distant world called Lagash that orbits six suns which leave it bathed in perpetual sunlight, save for several rare occasions in which all the suns set at the same time.
However, in the September 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, Asimov published what is probably his most famous story, “Nightfall.”
He sold his first science fiction story, “Marooned off Vesta” in 1939 to Amazing Stories, and began to quickly place more stories in other magazines, including “Strange Playfellow,” “Reason,” and “Liar!,” the first of his famous robot stories. This was also where he read the earliest science fiction magazines and aspired to write for them. After immigrating to the United States in 1922, he and his family settled in Brooklyn, New York, where he grew up in his father’s candy store. While it’s not exactly about an eclipse, the event is a good time to look back on one particularly famous science fiction novelette, Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall.”Īsimov is considered one of the genre’s best-known authors. The image of the moon blotting out the sun is a powerful one: eclipses appear periodically throughout science fiction literature, either as visual flair in a science fiction movie, or a useful tool for a time traveler who happens to be in the right time and place to use one to escape a deadly ritual of some kind.
Later today, the moon will pass in front of the sun over North America, resulting in a total solar eclipse the likes of which hasn’t been seen in decades over the continent.
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