It was difficult choosing a story by Asimov where he incorporated religion because he really didn’t do it very much, but I wanted to do a trilogy of the Big Three and contrast the way they approached religion in their stories. So even though “The Last Question” can only tangentially be considered to deal with religion, it’s such a popular story, I decided to use it.
Asimov did add religion, much against his will, in his early Foundation stories, at the behest of his editor John W. Campbell, but there it was the “religion” of science, and since science actually worked, it was used to bring other planets under the control of the Foundation as the corrupt Galactic Empire was falling apart.
There was also “Unto the Fourth Generation”, which wasn’t so much a religious story as it was a Jewish story, but to tell the truth, I don’t care for it very much. But here’s how it came about, as the Good Doctor related in his autobiography:
Yet that didn’t mean I abandoned science fiction entirely. I had lunch with Bob Mills in New York on October 23, and he asked me to write a story for him. He said that that morning he had seen the name Lefkowitz two or three times, each time spelled differently, and he thought there was a story there.
“What kind of a story?” I asked blankly.
“I don’t know,” he said, pettishly. “A story! You’re the writer.”
So on the twenty-ninth, I began a story about a man who is haunted by Lefkowitzes in different spellings and called it “Unto the Fourth Generation.” I had it done in a day, sent it off, and it was accepted. A very nice little story, I thought. (Bob Mills was now editor of F & SF, by the way, Tony Boucher having left the post.)
“Unto the Fourth Generation” is the only even faintly Jewish story I have ever written, in the sense of its dealing with what might be considered a Jewish theme.
It appeared in the April 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
There’s also this little anecdote. After the disastrous first meeting between Isaac and Janet Jeppson, who would eventually become Asimov’s second wife, they met again at a Mystery Writers dinner, Asimov having written a mystery novel in the meantime. This meeting went much, much better, until—
Robert Mills, on finding out that she was a science-fiction fan, asked if she read Fantasy and Science Fiction, and when she said she did, he asked her if she had read the just-published “Unto the Fourth Generation.”
She said, “Yes.”
“What did you think of it?”
I ought to have interrupted at once to say that I was the author, in order to prevent the mouse-trapping, but I must admit I wanted to hear what she would say, in case she had forgotten I had written it.
She had forgotten. “It had a serious flaw,” she said. “The protagonist went through the experience and then, in the end, it was as though nothing had happened. He had in no way been changed by it.”
And then Bob said I was the author, and Janet, embarrassed, tried to apologize.
“No,” I said, “you’re perfectly right. That is a flaw. I’ll change it when I put it in one of my story collections.” (And I did, too.)
Even with the changed ending, I still find the story very minor league Asimov.
You can read the original version that appeared in the magazine with the unchanged ending here.
Incidentally, the title comes from Exodus 20:5 in the familiar Authorized or King James Version: “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;”
Or the New International Version: “You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me,”
You probably won’t hear that verse in Sunday School anytime soon. A jealous god? A god that, when it gets angry at someone, it punishes not just the person it’s angry at, but their children and grandchildren, unto the fourth generation? But that’s the god that Jews and Christians apparently worship.
Doesn’t sound like a very loving god to me. I wouldn’t worship it even if it weren’t imaginary.