The Gods Themselves

The Gods Themselves is a 1972 science fiction novel by Isaac Asimov, his first original novel in fifteen years. It won the Nebula Award for best novel in 1972 and the Hugo Award the following year, and it is unusual among his books for the way it is built.

The plot rests on an invention: the Electron Pump, which trades matter between this universe and a parallel one and supplies the Earth with apparently limitless energy. An older scientist, Hallam, takes the credit for it, and a younger physicist named Peter Lamont works out that the exchange is slowly destabilising the sun. The second part of the book takes place in the parallel universe, among a species that reproduces in threes and lives on pure energy, and the third returns to Earth.

Asimov divides the novel into three sections with different viewpoints, and the title comes from Schiller's line about the gods themselves fighting in vain against stupidity. The book's real subject is the defence of a comfortable arrangement by people who have been told what it costs them.