When I wrote about Isaac Asimov’s story “The Ugly Little Boy”, I mentioned that Asimov had never even acknowledged the existence of the short film that was made of it and that I therefore suspected that he didn’t hold a very high opinion of it.

Well, I’ve been going through my collection of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and in the letters column in the July 1988 issue one of the readers reminded the Good Doctor about that Canadian production. Asimov replied:

Yes, that’s true, I saw that production of The Ugly Little Boy. It was a non-commercial film made by a Canadian company for use in schools. They also made All the Troubles in the World, sticking very close to my story and making the ending heartstoppingly effective. I liked that even better than The Ugly Little Boy. But, of course, when I denied ever having been TV’d or movie’d, I meant commercially, Hollywoodily, on all the screens.

Notice that he avoids actually mentioning what he thought of the film of “The Ugly Little Boy” by deflecting right away to a film of another one of his stories that he liked better.

So what is “All the Troubles of the World”? 

It’s one of the Multivac stories, the very loosely connected series about the sprawling super computer that Asimov began writing in the 1950s and continued off and on for pretty much the rest of his life. This one was written especially to help support a new magazine that had just appeared, Super-Science Fiction. The story was featured in its April 1958 issue, and Asimov was disappointed when it came out because his first name was mis-spelled on the cover.

Sadly, that issue is not in the archives, so I can’t link to it, but there is a pdf of the story here. That seems to be some sort of educational site, so I assume that story is being taught in some school’s curriculum.

The story was later included in his story collection Nine Tomorrows, which is where I first encountered it.

It’s a good story, although a lot of the details are very badly dated. For example, Multivac, as I said, is this huge super computer of the future that now has spread out over acres of land area, but the only way to communicate with it is via typing at a terminal. Apparently, in 1958 when Asimov wrote the story, he had not yet imagined that one would be able to talk to computers and hear their replies.

Happily, the 22 minute film that Asimov referred to is available on YouTube, so I can link to that. It was made in 1978, and the director, Dianne Haak-Edson, and/or the script writer, while keeping it quite faithful to Asimov’s story, did update some of the details. Multivac now has the ability to hear oral questions and reply, for example.

I think Asimov’s story is still worth reading, and the film, even though it was clearly made on a shoestring budget and the special effects aren’t all that special, is worth a view. Asimov was clearly pleased with the way the ending to his story was handled, and I agree with him.

I don’t have a cast list, but a couple of the faces look familiar to me.

The time is sometime in the future when Multivac is controlling all aspects of the government and the economy and doing a very good job of it too. By keeping track of each and every individual, it’s able to predict most crimes such as first degree murder before they happen and thus prevent them by giving law enforcement advance warning. But now it’s uncovered the probability of a new crime about to be committed, a crime far worse than first degree murder.