The Gods Themselves
by Isaac Asimov
Summary
A scientist discovers that a lump of tungsten in his laboratory has become plutonium 186, an isotope that cannot exist under the physical laws of this universe. The explanation is that someone in a parallel universe with different laws is swapping matter with ours, and the exchange releases free energy at both ends. The Electron Pump is built, energy becomes limitless, and the man who noticed the isotope becomes a national hero for a discovery he did not actually make.
One physicist works out that the exchange is altering the strong nuclear force in our sun and will make it explode, and finds that nobody will listen, because the Pump is free power and the man who would have to admit an error is now famous.
The middle third leaves humanity entirely and goes to the other universe, where a species lives in three sexes: a Rational, an Emotional and a Parental, who periodically melt together into a single being. Asimov follows one such triad in detail, and the Emotional, Dua, is the best character he ever wrote.
The final section is set on a colonised moon and resolves the physics.
The three parts barely connect and the tone changes completely between them, which is either the book's flaw or its point. The human sections are stiff. The alien section is extraordinary.
Around three hundred pages, plainly written and quick, with the alien section considerably stranger than anything else in his enormous bibliography.
Best for readers who want to see a famously limited writer deliberately attack his own limitations and mostly succeed, and for anyone who has only read the Foundation and robot books and assumes they know what Asimov does.
Historical Context & Significance
The Gods Themselves won the 1973 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 1972 Nebula Award and the Locus Award.
Isaac Asimov wrote it as an answer to a standing criticism of his fiction, that he could not write aliens, could not write women and would not write sex. The middle section, whose alien biology is built entirely around a three way sexual relationship, is a direct response, and he was open about that.
It was his first science fiction novel in fifteen years. He had spent the 1960s writing popular science and reference books at enormous speed, and published more than four hundred titles across his career.
The title comes from Schiller, in a line about how against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain, and each of the three parts takes a fragment of it as a heading.