TOW #20 - Isaac Asimov on New Ideas - Written

Isaac Asimov is widely considered to be one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time. Having written many great classics like I, Robot and the colored Mars series, Asimov is undoubtedly one of the ost important writers in the entire genre. Like many short essays published by popular authors, On New Ideas is a large departure from his normal writing material. Isaac argues that creativity is the act of flying in the face of reason in order to create something new and beautiful. He argues this with manny examples an anecdotes from his own personal experience, and supports these anecdotes with beautifully simple prose. He references many of the works of 19th centruy naturalists and their view on creativity and beauty in combination with their views on nature. He speaks about how they, in the face of a looming and inevitable industrial revolution, write their ideas about the beauty of nature. This fits in well with his thesis of flying in the face of reason and inevitablitiy in order to create something amazing. He references Thomas Huxley's saying upon completing the origion of the species, "Why didn't I think of that?" The reason he gives is because Huxley was not one to fly in the face of what was at the time known as reason, the ideas of fundamentalist religious ideas on the nature of man and biology. Darwin was a dude who was like "I have some ideas about how this works, and I'm going to go up against what most of you view as reason to present them." This, Asimov argues, was the epitome of creativity, the O.G. of new ideas. All in all, On Ideas is a great meditation on the nature of how one gets new ideas and how creativity is spawned in humanity. It is a very effective rhetorical text.