a dystopia. Asimov's thesis, revealed in the final scene, is that central control of scientific research is not necessarily immoral, but that in the long run, it may be impossible after all. The character of Thaddeus Araman is a recognizable dystopian spokesman in the mould of Beatty in Fahrenheit 451 and Mustapha Mond in Brave New World, both of whom also acknowledge the limitations of their societies' control mechanisms. However, reviewer Max Brown noted that "In the final scene, the government man admonishes the protagonists for creating 'a fishbowl world' in which privacy had ceased to exist. In fact, however, such a world already existed for two generations—only that invading privacy was hitherto a government monopoly. The chronoscope in fact gave the government far more of an omniscient power than even the notorious telescreen of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The only thing the protagonists did was to break the government monopoly of this awesome power and let the 'fish' see each other. ... Asimov's basic premise is that well-meaning government officials, possessing the total power of knowing what anyone at any time was doing, would for two whole generations be able to restrain themselves from abusing that power. Frankly, I don't possess such a confidence in human nature. I would certainly not want the government to have such a power for two years, let alone two generations." Notes Asimov wrote the story after seven years as a professor at the Boston University School of Medicine. He said in 1973 that he tried to not let his personal life appear in fiction but "The Dead Past" was an exception, such as the scientific-research setting and the protagonist's interest in Carthage. In his autobiography In Memory Yet Green, Asimov writes, "The story, one of my favorites, is most memorable to me for what I put in it accidentally. What I was planning was a story that inverted the usual assumption that government planning is tyrannical and that freedom of scientific inquiry is good. In the course of the story, however, I threw in, almost at random, a reference to Carthage that somehow took on a life of its own and quite unexpectedly introduced a subplot that provided the whole course of the story with excellent motivation. Any critic reading the story is bound to conclude I planned that subplot from the beginning, though I swear I didn't." Although the story is set in