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    A Study Guide for Isaac Asimov's "The Machine that Won the War"
    A Study Guide for Isaac Asimov's "The Machine that Won the War"
    A Study Guide for Isaac Asimov's "The Machine that Won the War"
    Ebook42 pages30 minutes

    A Study Guide for Isaac Asimov's "The Machine that Won the War"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Isaac Asimov's "The Machine that Won the War," 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 6, 2016
    ISBN9781535838160
    A Study Guide for Isaac Asimov's "The Machine that Won the War"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Isaac Asimov's "The Machine that Won the War" - Gale

      11

      The Machine That Won the War

      Isaac Asimov

      1961

      Introduction

      Isaac Asimov, along with Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, is often considered one of the founding figures of modern science fiction. Asimov's Robot and Foundations series have had a profound impact on the perception of science fiction in popular culture. Some of his works were filmed for television in the 1950s and 1960s, and his ideas provided much of the source material for films and television shows such as Star Wars and Star Trek. His short-story The Machine That Won the War grapples with the thorniest questions of the cold war, when human civilization hung in the balance between war and peace, and deals with the difference between perception and reality in the public understanding of computer science at the beginning of the information age. Asimov's terse prose style exemplifies the ideals of simplicity and clarity that are often valued in science fiction, in a story that is very much representative of this period of science fiction. Asimov's story can be compared with other cold war science fiction, including Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains and Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, as they all deal in their different ways with the theme of the extinction of our species through war. The Machine That Won the War was published in the 1969 collection Nightfall and Other Stories. It is also available in Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories: Vol. 1, published by Broadway in 1990.

      Author Biography

      Asimov was born on January 2, 1920, in a rural village in Belarus (then the Soviet Union). Three years later his family immigrated to the United States. He began reading science fiction in the pulp magazines sold in his family's candy store in Brooklyn, New York. He was an active science fiction fan throughout his teenage years, and he attended the first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939. Shortly thereafter, he began publishing science fiction in the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction under the tutelage of editor 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 earned a doctorate in biochemistry from Columbia University in 1948 and taught at Boston University until 1958. He 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 tended

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