ov revisits Denison, who, like Lamont, saw his career ruined by Hallam. Now he wants to start anew by moving to a colony on the Moon. Although he still considers Hallam a fraud, he regrets the childish, self-righteous impulse that caused him to lash out at the lesser scientist and led to his professional ruin. He agrees with Lamont’s assessment of the Electron Pump, but, wiser now, he realizes that the correct course of action is not to attack his enemy but to find a scientific solution to the problem, which, with the help of lovely, Moon-born Selene, he strives to do. Although this section at times feels merely like a functional wrap-up, rather than a continuation of the second section’s brilliance, Asimov keeps the reader’s interest by providing an unusually realistic portrait of what life might be like on the Moon, with close attention to some of the effects it would have on the human body. And while some may scoff at the book’s ending, Asimov shows courage by maintaining optimism in the face of seemingly endless stupidity. Notice the question mark he appends to this section’s title.

Although at first it seems Hallam alone embodies the stupidity against which we must contend, several forms of idiocy emerge throughout the novel. For instance, there is mankind’s unquestioning acceptance of Hallam’s quick-fix solution to its energy problems, and there are the scientists who allow Hallam’s celebrity to blind them to his vanity and incompetence. But the most frequent kind of stupidity shown in the novel is self-centeredness, stupid because it prevents mankind from achieving its full potential. Even the Hard Ones, the gods of intellect themselves, are guilty of it.

It is the reason a novel populated mainly by excellent thinkers — Lamont, Bronowski, Odeen, and Denison among them — can also be a novel about stupidity. Only Denison, humbled, resigned to a fameless existence, desirous now only of working for the advancement of humanity, is of any help to us.

While The Gods Themselves has a few flaws — too many adverbs affixed to the dialogue tags, a so-so love story — its many merits make them seem negligible, and it emerges as an ambitious, hopeful portrait of human folly that deserves attention not only from science fiction readers but from all readers. Due to the impending energy crisis we face today, the book, though over thirty years old, even feels topical.

It seems unlikely, however, that it will ever receive the acclaim it deserves. Literary critics have always disliked Asimov’s straightforward, unadorned prose because it does not require them, the experts, to decipher it. And, while it’s OK for a novelist to wander into science fiction in order to expand the absurdity of his absurdist vision beyond the confines of contemporary reality, it remains, to many aesthetes, distasteful to show an actual interest in anything as practical as science. But Asimov was as much a scientist as an artist. He was interested in everything; as a result, his books display a prodigious intellect at work, one which dwarfs that of the highbrow who concerns himself only with the fine-tuning of his emotional sensibility and the advancement of his literary style into more and more distant realms of obscurity. But while Asimov posthumously continues to stand as large as anyone within the science fiction community, the literati will probably never give him his proper respect. You remember what Schiller said.