A Study Guide for Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall," 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 Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535829595

Book preview

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Nightfall

Isaac Asimov

1941

Introduction

In 1941, John W. Campbell, Jr., editor of the premier science fiction magazine at that time, asked one of the fledgling writers he mentored an intriguing question: What would happen if people saw the stars only once every thousand years? He postulated that people would go mad and asked twenty-one-year old Isaac Asimov to write a story about it. The result was Nightfall, now one of the most famous science fiction stories of all time. Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1941, it now appears in dozens of anthologies, but is perhaps most easily found in Nightfall and Other Stories or another of Asimov's own anthologies The Best of Isaac Asimov.

To describe a population to whom the appearance of stars would be a rare phenomenon, Asimov created the planet Lagash where there are six suns and perpetual daylight. With no nighttime, the stars cannot be seen and therefore are not known. Astronomical science has not yet reached the point of being able to look beyond the suns. The concept of darkness is mysterious and frightening. However, scientists at Saro University are predicting a total eclipse of all the suns at once. They are aware, based upon archaeological studies, that civilization seems to have been destroyed about every two thousand years, the same time period of the occurrence of the eclipses. If the two are related, will the darkness once again cause a hysteria that will destroy the world? As the scientists prepare for calamity, they are joined by a newspaper reporter, and all hope to save future generations from fear through a record of factual knowledge. However, a religious cult is also predicting the phenomenon as a judgment against evil. Nightfall is a psychological thriller as scientists fight ignorance, zealotry, madness, and their own fears of the