Short Story Review Isaac Asimov Profession

Short story review – Isaac Asimov – Profession.  1957 in The Nightfall collection and other anthologies. Asimov’s novella is a riff on Huxley’s Brave New World, with rather a conservative appreciation for the implanted wisdom machines he creates. The story is very straightforward. Hundreds of years into the future science, technology and engineering have become so complicated that conventional schooling cannot hope to teach us enough to get by in life. We are therefore given all our reading skills in one single mechanical injection when we hit the age of about seven. Years later, a similar machine chooses our career vocations for us. The system appears to go wrong for young George. Once able to read, he tries to anticipate a programming carer by reading books on the subject on his own initiative, in advance of the day his profession is declared. On that day, his knowledge conflicts with the machine teachings and he is declared unsuitable for any profession at all. He considers himself gifted rather than feeble minded, and fails to see that his separation to special needs groups is itself a respect for that. He is effectively a source for new ideas and innovations, and as in Plato’s Republic, a class apart & above the ordinary man. A sometimes-amusing sub-plot to the novella is the future Olympic games, where the sports are displays of skills in engineering and manufacture, with competitors trying to solve some mechanical problem more efficiently than others.  George discovers that this is really an inter-galactic marketing exercise for selling the best new machine advances and trade in employees. The scary part is that throughout the book, Asimov seems to see this as a good, healthy future and George’s fate as a happy ending.  I find his utopian notions rather more dystopian in this case. George is free to think for himself, but in a secret enclave the rest of the citizens, including his own family, must never know about.

Arthur Chappell.