ทีวี:2000

by Isaac Asimov (Editor), กุลติ (Translator), ณัฐ ศาสตร์ส่องวิทย์ (Editor)

นิยายวิทยาศาสตร์คัดสรร โดย Isaac Asimov

เรื่องในเล่ม
เอาล่ะ หายใจเข้าได้แล้ว จากเรื่อง "Now Inhale" ของ Eric Frank Russel
นักฝันอาชีพ จากเรื่อง "Dreaming is a Private Thing" ของ Isaac Asimov
บุรุษผู้พิฆาตโทรทัศน์ จากเรื่อง "The Man Who Murdered Television" ของ Joselph Patrouch
ยอดจำอวด จากเรื่อง "The Jester" ของ William Tenn
บุรุษผู้กลับมา จากเรื่อง "The Man Who Came Back" ของ Robert Silverberg
นั่นแน่ ฉันเห็นเธอแล้ว จากเรื่อง "I See You" ของ Damon Knight
ค่าเสี่ยงตาย จากเรื่อง "The Prize of Peril" ของ Robert Sheckley
ทีมเจ้าถิ่นย่อมได้เปรียบ จากเรื่อง "Home Team Advantage" ของ Jack C. Haldeman II
ทหารรับจ้าง จากเรื่อง "Mercenary" ของ Mark Reynolds
ทูตไร้ตราตั้ง จากเรื่อง "Without Portfolio" ของ James E. Gunn
ความคิด จากเรื่อง "The Idea" ของ Barry N. Malzberg
เอ้า สอนกันเข้าไป จากเรื่อง "And Madly Teach" ของ Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
รู้ไหมว่า กี่โมงกี่ยามแล้ว จากเรื่อง "What Time Is It?" ของ Jack C. Haldeman II
สัมภาษณ์ จากเรื่อง "Interview" ของ Frank A. Javor
ฉากจำบังของอนาธิปไตย จากเรื่อง "Cloak of Anarchy" ของ Larry Niven
ถึงเวลาของรายการข่าวแล้ว จากเรื่อง "And Now the News" ของ Theodore Sturgeon
ชาลี คนดีที่งี่เง่า จากเรื่อง "Very Proper" ของ Charlies Dean Ing
คณะกรรมการครอบจักรวาล จากเรื่อง "Committee of the Whole" ของ Frank Herbert

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories, Anthologies

768 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Works of prolific Russian-American writer Isaac Asimov include popular explanations of scientific principles, The Foundation Trilogy (1951-1953), and other volumes of fiction.

Isaac Asimov, a professor of biochemistry, wrote as a highly successful author, best known for his books.

Asimov, professor, generally considered of all time, edited more than five hundred books and ninety thousand letters and postcards. He published in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey decimal classification but lacked only an entry in the category of philosophy (100).

People widely considered Asimov, a master of the genre alongside Robert Anson Heinlein and Arthur Charles Clarke as the "big three" during his lifetime. He later tied Galactic Empire and the Robot into the same universe as his most famous series to create a unified "future history" for his stories much like those that Heinlein pioneered and Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson previously produced. He penned "Nightfall," voted in 1964 as the best short story of all time; many persons still honor this title. He also produced well mysteries, fantasy, and a great quantity of nonfiction. Asimov used Paul French, the pen name, for the Lucky Starr, series of juvenile novels.

Most books of Asimov in a historical way go as far back to a time with possible question or concept at its simplest stage. He often provides and mentions well nationalities, birth, and death dates for persons and etymologies and pronunciation guides for technical terms. Guide to Science, the tripartite set Understanding Physics, and Chronology of Science and Discovery exemplify these books.

Asimov, a long-time member, reluctantly served as vice president of Mensa international and described some members of that organization as "brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs." He took more pleasure as president of the humanist association. The asteroid 5020 Asimov, the magazine Asimov's Science Fiction, an elementary school in Brooklyn in New York, and two different awards honor his name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_As...

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

This anthology that appeared in 1982 reprinted short science fiction stories from the early 1950s through the late 1970s that speculate on the future of television and the impact it will have on society. Despite the title, not all of the stories are set in that far-future world of the year 2000, but it conveyed the idea nicely. The book is divided into two sections, The Control of TV and The Content of TV. Not all of the stories fit the themes exactly, but it's interesting how well some of them foresaw what was ahead, though most are obviously rather dated now. There are stories by Mack Reynolds and Robert Sheckley that quite accurately predict the impact of reality programming, Damon Knight shows how people can watch each other, and of course there are the bread-and-circuses parallels like Eric Frank Russell's Now Inhale. In Asimov's introduction he says: "Right now, we are seeing the rapid development of cable TV and of TV cassettes and TV recording- which may end up producing greater changes than television itself did." If he only knew! It's a true science fiction collection, examining how technology can shape and change the future, and it's nifty that now we're living in that post-changed world. Some of the stories are creaky, but that's part of the fun. My favorites were And Now the News by Theodore Sturgeon, Cloak of Anarchy by Larry Niven, and what I think was Lloyd Biggle, Jr.'s best story, And Madly Teach.

[Darnoc Leadburger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Asimov always thought a bit highly of himself, so it didn't surprise me when he said that this collection exemplified everything that science fiction is about, which is quite the claim... that being said - to my surprise - I actually agreed with him. He and his frequent co-anthologists Charles G. Waugh and Martin Harry Greenberg collected thirty years' worth of television-centric science fiction stories that, despite occasionally straying from the theme, show off a variety of under-credited authors while entertaining the reader and showing that some science fiction writers really are prophets. Here's my story-by-story review of 1982's *TV: 2000*.

Section One is "Control of the TV," showing different aspects of powers behind the throne.

--An alien government's role in broadcasting is featured in "Now Inhale" by Eric Frank Russell, where a human man crashlands on an alien planet, is captured, and is forced to play a game where the reward for winning or losing is death that will be televised throughout the world; I guess it's a bread-and-circus way of keeping the masses stupid? Whatever the reasoning, our protagonist comes up with a clever way around the game's rules and the story ends in a moderately satisfying matter. Robert Silverberg pulled this concept off better in his short "Double Dare," but "Now Inhale" gets a still-respectable 7.25/10 even though the TV's presence is negligible.
--"Dreaming is a Private Thing" by Isaac Asimov himself is a good story that shows us a day in the life of a CEO responsible for a "dreamie" production company. It starts with him promising to sponsor a young boy who may turn out to be good at dreaming up the future's preferred form of entertainment and continues with two subsequent meetings with the government and his top dreamer which shine light on this future. It's a typical Asimov story set in the future, which means that it was good and thought-provoking with its cool novum, even if the overall point and impact got lost along the way. 7.75/10.
--I've never heard of Joseph Patrouch, but "The Man Who Murdered Television" makes for a good first impression. The main character is a television writer whose daughter is an environmental activist who wonders why he doesn't approve f her picketing. He tells her that he used to protest against radio waves since he was able to prove they cause cancer, but Big Tech didn't like his message, so they tried to silence him. He ended up forming an alliance of screenwriters to dumb down television programming so less people would watch it. Feels like something I'd write in 2023... a little lean but still a well-earned 8/10.
--"The Jester" by William Tenn is one of those prophetic short stories that makes you double-check when it was published. Even more incredibly, this comes in as the book's earliest story with a publication date of 1951. It features a television comedian who fires his ghostwriters in favor of a made-to-order robot who will write new jokes based off a library filled with the comedian's original material. Things quickly go awry. It's got a hokey 50's flavor, but its rendition of generative AI (the kind of "AI" represented by ChatGPT and co) is second-to-none. This story is way more impactful than it would've been even two years ago, and that shows just why SF can be such a great genre. If only its plot was more significant; 7.75/10.
--"The Man Who Came Back" by Robert Silverberg is not a bad story but I do wonder just why it was included in this book. Picture the scene: a man buys his way back to Earth from a far-flung colony world, seemingly for the sole purpose of reuniting with his young love, who's now a shallow hag with a gratuitously amount of ex-husbands. I guess he does use the power of the camera to leverage his way back into her life, but the ending (where he brings her back to the colony under some unexplained kind of control) leaves a bit to be desired. Seven.
--"I See You" by Damon Knight is a disappointment; I haven't really liked any of his short fiction. That being said, it does remind me a lot of Clarke + Baxter's well-done novel *The Light of Other Days* since it's all about humanity gaining the ability to view any point in history at once. It's told in a confusing and scatter-shot way with a bunch of different intertwined perspectives. Not a bad idea but just couldn't hold me attention. Gets a 6/10 because it's prescient and my lack of care is probably more my fault than his.

Section Two is "The Content of the TV".

--Section II starts with "The Prize of Peril," probably the second Robert Sheckley story that I've read. *The Prize of Peril* is a TV-show where contestants are hunted through the city by mercenaries, and this story focuses on the subject of one of these hunts who's occasionally assisted by viewers, who can buy him extra supplies or distractions if they feel so inclined as to help him survive. This inherently makes it a sad world, but the flashbacks throughout the piece showing how our contestant "rose up the ranks" of game shows and into this dark future are probably the story's highlight. 7.5/10
--"Home Team Advantage" is a bit chilling since it deals with aliens preparing to eat all of humankind after our baseball team loses to theirs. Are we really expected to believe that all of humanity accepts this? Come on, Jack C. Haldeman II (Joe's older brother). The losing baseball team will get eaten first, and - well - let's just say justice is served. Pun intended. Not bad for a three-page story, and I liked the dynamics between baseball players. Still, a bit of an *under*served premise - 7.25
--Now, "Mercenary" by Mack Reynolds, on the other hand, was a shining highlight of the anthology. It's set in a future where society is strung along by "fracas," corporate wars which are governed by government conglomerates. Average Joes, whether they're watching fracas on the boob-tube or high on drugs, are obsessed with these wars. One man who crawled his way out of the TV-crazed dregs is Joe Mauser. He's a veteran who's signing on to help out a transport tube company in their fracas against hovercraft manufacturers. It's got an interesting futuristic world and powerful characters that have a couple (if not many) dimensions, and even though I was reading it the morning of a big musical gig, I dug it! I'm not sure exactly why the world and the action and Mauser's advisory role struck a chord, but it did, and now I'll look out for the Mauser novels. 8.5/10.
--I've mostly forgotten James Gunn's "Without Portfolio," but that's not his fault; it was mine for reading it right after that Big Gig. It's set on the eve of nuclear war, shortly after America has hired a business man to run America's foreign relations. Apparently government and business aren't too different after all. I remember it being clever and enjoyable enough, so I'll shoot for a 7.5.
--Malzberg's "The Idea" is frustrating, but that's Barry for you. I really need to read more of his stuff, which "The Idea" both encourages and discourages me. Its main character is a guy who has a brand new "educational" programming idea which is greeted with enthusiasm but gradually walked back from under premiere day, when its horror drives our narrator's family away from him. And yet we never find out what it is. I want to love it, but I don't think I can - but the dynamics between the network folks are funny and maybe even insightful. 7.5/10.
--"And Madly Teach," besides being my first Lloyd Biggle Jr. story, is also my second favorite story in *TV: 2000*. It's all about remote education, which has been very common here in the 2020s. Sure, this 50's-esque depiction of it is a bit hokie with its "40,000 children watching the same stream" and all that, but it's still rather prescient. Our main character is a middle-aged woman used to teaching in-person in Mars, and she hopes her old ways of teaching appeal to enough of her remote students to keep her on the department's payroll. 8/10 for fun characters + ideas + nice writing.

Speaking of writing, you'll notice I'm not critiquing it that much. I'm not critiquing as much as I'd like to at all; instead, I'm over-summarizing. I don't have a great sense of which writing was great and which wasn't, as the prose styles kind of blurred together. Oh well; means there isn't any crappy prose to complain about.

What does Section III, "The Consequences of TV," have in store for us?

--Jack C. Haldeman gets represented twice due to "What Time Is It?", a story about the first hyperspace journey which a clutch of old men have paid passage for, apparently to catch a re-run of an old children's show due to the way radio waves stay in space. It didn't strike me as great when I read it, but as it's been fermenting it's become a haunting and maybe even powerful story. It's an 8/10 for now, but time will tell how its rating changes...
--"Interview" by Frank A. Javor (who I don't know) is one of those stories that can kinda bounce off you. I don't remember the crux of it - our main character's motivations - but I do remember that our MC was a "TV" personality who ran around a disaster scene cataloguing the wreckage of not only the scene but also a young woman, whose responses were streamed to millions of people as some kind of intimate news service. Good story, but something didn't click at the time. Still, can't blame Javor all that much, so: 7/10.
--I liked "Cloak of Anarchy" by Larry Niven, in which the television takes the form of floating police sphere-cameras which patrol a "free zone" where citizens from someplace in the Known Space are freed from all rules except those against hurting each other. Then our main character's acquaintance disactivates all of police spheres in the free zone to mildly disastrous results. Here's another... 7.25 since it was good enough but didn't inspire any great critical thoughts.. Quite granular on the ratings today, aren't we?
--The finish line is in sight with "And Now the News..." by Theodore Sturgeon. The principal character is a family man with a bizarre obsession about the news in all its forms - an obsession which, when his wife tries to break it, ends up breaking him. The second half of the story is spearheaded by a psychiatrist hired by our resident lunatic's wife who tries to seek out and heal the poor guy. Well, by the end of the story, he doesn't seem that poor... kind of forgettable. The moral of the news driving a man mad is cool, but not inherently redeeming... 6.75.
--I've read "Very Proper Charlies" by Dean Ing before in its original *Destines: The Paperback Magazine* form,, and I think I like it less now than I did. It starts intriguingly with a bunch of powerful media people coming together and making a plan to make all of their news networks discredit terrorist organizations and refuse to broadcast terrorist demands (a clever way to foil the increasing appeal of world-wide notoriety via television), but the story slides downhill when one of the executives is captured and tortured by the terrorists. Seriously - there was no point to it. And I don't like torture for the sake of it. 5/10; better luck with *Anasazi*, Dean.
--Frank Herbert finishes the collection with "Collection of the Whole," a surprisingly good story where a man goes to court over a cattle-grazing dispute and quickly hijacks the broadcast-nature of the trial in order to tell humanity about lasers which could be used as weapons of mass destruction - especially if only one group had access to them. But if we live in a state of Mutually Assured Destruction...... It's the best short-story (and longer) about TV's consequences in here, and the dawning of what our protagonist is doing feels well-orchestrated. 7.75/10.

Usually, when I review a short fiction collection, I walk out with a more muted opinion of it than I did before said review, but in this case, I'm walking away happier than I thought I was. *TV: 2000* contains a lot of good stories and covers a lot of ground, including stories written by authors more akin to fortune tellers than they probably expected. Reynolds and Biggle were standouts here, although Herbert, Asimov, and Haldeman outdid themselves also. There are plenty of other worthwhile stories in here, so I encourage you to give it a shot, even if you have to visit a senior center book sale to get it (like I did, but that's a long story). Anyways, in conclusion, *TV: 2000* earns a hearty (if slightly uneven) 7.5/10 overall, and I look forward to more Asimov-curated collections in the future. See if I've gotten around to any of those yet @Darnoc Leadburger here on Goodreads and have a great rest of your day.

[Phil Giunta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gathering some of the best SF writers of the time including Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Silverberg, and more, TV:2000 offers tales of television's effects on society, how it can be used to shape opinion as much as entertain, misinform, disinform, and overwhelm.

As with any anthology, some stories are better than others and a few seem to miss the theme entirely. My favorites included "The Jester" by William Tenn, "The Prize of Peril" by Robert Scheckley, "Mercenary" by Mack Reynolds, "And Madly Teach" by Lloyd Biggle, Jr., "Interview" by Frank A. Javor.