Talk:Earth Is Room Enough

A Theme?

This is not posted in Asimov’s biography, nor in the explanative for this page, so I thought that I would bring to your attention a pervasive theme I noticed among several of the works for this anthology. Many of the stories deal with the social integration of computers. Computers are often portrayed as beneficial to humankind. However, they have a strange retrograde affect. Rather than promoting the extension of a social phenomenon, they limit its applicability. In ‘Franchise’ computers manage the voting process, but only one person votes. In ‘The Fun They Had’ computers manage the education of every child, but every child takes ‘school’ at home in isolation. In ‘Someday’ computers are storytellers, but almost everyone does not know how to read nor understand the value of literacy. Do you understand what I am implying? Rather than advance the extensions of voting, education, and literacy in the traditional democratic extension of rights, computers now manage and ‘enhance’ these affairs by denying their extension. Certainly the characters of these stories appear to exist within a world that has taken an almost technological utopianist view of these developments, but quite often the characters (and perhaps Asimov) feign concerned that technology has not always proven so. (Mchelada 18:47, 7 February 2007 (UTC))