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The following is a closed discussion about the work, but not directed to improving the article. Please do not modify it. See WP:NOTAFORUM.
I don't know when I read Nightfall - 1950s or 60s - but I do recall being so dissatisfied at its ending. How were we supposed to believe in a planet which had several times achieved intelligent life but didn't know even the concept of darkness? Which means their very first habitations, of course needed in inclement weather let alone cold/wet seasons, must have been made of glass? So they discovered how to make glass as soon as they were able to manage fire? Oh, OK, their six suns meant they never had seasons.
But each time an intelligent life form developed, it never thought to explore inside any cave or pothole? And they'd reached highly advanced stages without ever needing to sink mineshafts. So they didn't understand the notion of a lamp?
I can't be the only person who realized these things as soon as finishing reading the story, so it's a puzzle to me how it's consistently said to be the greatest scifi work ever, or some such. I loved Azimov's stories when I was young, particularly the Foundation series. But how can it be said that Nightfall is the greatest ever when it's built on such a non-credible situation? L0ngpar1sh (talk) 21:10, 21 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
When the short story was originally published, the physics of multistar systems of order six were not yet understood. Planetary formation theories was drawn from a sample of 1 (the Solar System) And habitability of planets is still not really understood. We now know they are tiered binary systems. And the physics of the situation only need to exist for a few cycles, long enough for the people to not know about a past where there was a night, or a visible moon, and for several eclipse periods to have happened. It doesn't need to have existed any longer than that. Before that period, there could have been a visible moon and night. And in the far future of the world, there could be again. -- 65.94.169.222 (talk) 11:27, 27 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Planet's and stars' name
"Lagash" is a well-known Middle East archaeological site (according to the En. Brit., "one of the most important capital cities in ancient Sumer, " Is there is evidence that IA intentionally chose this name rather than that he simply made up a name out of English phonemes?Kdammers (talk) 01:22, 3 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
The stars Trey and Patru are probably the numbers 3 and 4 in Romanian (3 written to match the pronunciation), see Romanian_numbers. Moreover, they are on places 3 and 4 in the list following the stars named by Greek letters. There are parallels to numbers in the others as well, so maybe from another language? 129.247.247.238 (talk) 10:33, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I remember wondering about that when I first read the story, but on a later re-read, I noticed that it was covered: "The eclipse that results, with the moon seven times the apparent diameter of Beta, covers all of Lagash and lasts well over half a day, so that no spot on the planet escapes the effects." The novelization's cover image might be flawed here -- if that's the "diamond ring" effect of an Earth-viewed eclipse, it would imply bodies of roughly equal angular size, I think. But I'm not sure; maybe the light from a smaller sun would still illuminate the moon's edge like that. Is it in fact a mistake, and if so, has any reliable source noted it? Joule36e5 (talk) 22:19, 5 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Genre
The lede refers to the original story as a novelette (links to novella entry), but in the body of the article, the term "short story" is used. When I looked at the word counts (for novella/novellette contests) given in the novella article, it seems (using two online word-counter tools that it falls well below the bottom counts. I think this needs clarification. Kdammers (talk) 14:17, 1 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
