A Study Guide for Isaac Asimov's "The Dead Past"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Isaac Asimov's "The Dead Past", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Studentsfor all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781535846141

Book preview

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The Dead Past

Isaac Asimov

1956

Introduction

Isaac Asimov was one of the leading authors of science fiction's golden age. The Dead Past (1956) is considered one of his finest stories. It exemplifies the main form or style of a golden-age science-fiction story, examining the impact of a single new piece of technology on society. At the same time, it is undoubtedly Asimov's best story from the point of view of literary art. The sophistication of characterization he achieves in the story is unparalleled in his work. The technological device in question in the story is a chronoscope, a machine that reputedly allows the detailed observation of history; but for Mr. Potterley, the problem is how to access—or even build—one. The tension of the story concerns the implications of both government and private control of the chronoscope and so foresees the rise of the information state in recent times, whereby the government and large corporations can use the internet to gather vast amounts of information on individuals that would at an earlier time have been inherently inaccessible and therefore private. The Dead Past appears in Earth Is Room Enough (1957).

Author Biography

Asimov was born on January 2, 1920, in the small Russian village of Petrovici. His family immigrated to the United States three years later. Asimov began reading science fiction in the pulp magazines sold in his family's candy store in Brooklyn. He was active in the science-fiction fan community throughout his teenage years and attended the First World Science Fiction Convention in 1939. He soon began to publish his own science-fiction stories in the pulp magazine Astounding, under the editorship of John W. Campbell. Asimov was unusual among early science-fiction authors in gaining a prominent place within the scientific establishment. After working as an engineer in aircraft research during World War II, he took a PhD in biochemistry from Columbia University in 1948 and taught at Boston University until 1958.

Asimov published all of his best-known science-fiction works in the 1940s and 1950s, including I, Robot, the Foundation trilogy, and the short story Nightfall. Asimov's stories tend to be rooted in scientific reality as so-called hard science fiction, though he did popularize ideas like hyperspace, a plot device to allow interstellar travel despite the difficulties from the point of view of physics. Asimov recalled in his memoir In Joy Still Felt about the original publication of The Dead Past in Astounding in April 1956:

In the course of the story … I threw in, almost at random, a reference to Carthage that somehow took on a life of its own and quite unexpectedly introduced a subplot that provided the whole course of the story with excellent motivation. Any critic reading the story is bound to conclude I planned that subplot from the beginning, though