Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition)

by James Gunn

  All the non-series stories mentioned so far, with the exceptions of "Nightfall" and "Marooned Off Vesta," were reprinted by Asimov in his collection The Early Asimov. The last story in that collection is "Mother Earth" (Astounding, May 1949). It is important largely for its premonitions of the robot novels. The Terrestrian Empire is in the process of falling; its fall has been predictable from the introduction of positronic robots into the Sirian sector colony Aurora, and from the establishment of an immigration quota against Earth by the Outer Worlds. A possible war by the Outer Worlds against Earth will be the final blow for the Empire. But a former Terrestrian ambassador sets up Earth to lose a quick war in order to prepare for a second Terrestrian Empire in which the citizens of the Outer Worlds will have deteriorated because of the alien chemistry of their planets and revolted against Outer Planet genetic policies or will have produced different varieties of humanity on all fifty Outer Worlds. Variety will be the norm, and they will no longer be united against Earth. Some details of the story were picked up, such as the fifty Outer Worlds and the possibility of deterioration, almost forty years later for the 1980s Foundation novels, Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth.

  By the time "Mother Earth" was published, Asimov's career had taken several new directions. He had finished the last of the Foundation stories, ". . . And Now You Don't," Doubleday had asked him to expand the rejected novella "Grow Old with Me" to 70,000 words in order to publish it as a book, and he had accepted a teaching job at the Boston University School of Medicine for $5,000 a year. He still had no way of knowing he could make a living as a freelance writer. As he reported in The Early Asimov, his total earnings for eleven years of writing had not reached $8,000.

  By 1952, as his books began to be published with comforting regularity two a year beginning in 1950 Asimov's income from writing began to exceed his salary. By 1957 he discovered that he was primarily a writer and was making considerably more money by writing than as a professor. When a new dean began to pressure him to devote more time to research and would not be convinced that Asimov's writing was his research, Asimov resigned everything except his title by that time he had been promoted to associate professor and turned to full-time writing for the first time. Unfortunately for science fiction, he decided to devote his time to non-fiction. In the years between 1949 and 1958, however, Asimov had produced his best science-fiction novels and some of his best stories. He was particularly inspired by the creation in 1950 of Galaxy Science Fiction, edited by Horace L. Gold. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, founded in 1949 under the editorship of Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, was more of an inspiration to others than to Asimov. F&SF specialized in fantasy and literary stories; Asimov, in technology and problem-solving. To F&SF Asimov sold humorous science-fiction verse based on literary models, mostly Gilbert and Sullivan, as well as, beginning in 1958, monthly science articles, which he claimed as his favorite writing and subsequently was to collect in many of his books. Galaxy, through Gold's requests, ideas, and goading and through the three cents a word payment, escalating with the fourth story to three and a half cents and up, helped Asimov to produce some of his best fiction.

  As Asimov mentions in his autobiography, he had grown beyond Campbell:

  In part it was because he [Campbell] had taken a wrong turning. He had moved into dianetics and from there into a series of other follies, and there was no way in which I could follow him. Furthermore, he could not separate his personal views from the magazine, but strove to incorporate those views into the stories he elicited from the authors, and many authors were only too delighted to comply and to "press Campbell's buttons." I could not do it any more than I could comply with his penchant for human superiority over extraterrestrials in earlier years.

  Second, there were new markets opening up, and I wanted to branch out. . . .

  Six of the first eight issues of Galaxy included works by Asimov: two short stories, a novelette, and a three-part serial. The first story, in the first issue of Galaxy (October 1950), was "Darwinian Pool Room." It consisted of a conversation speculating about the possibility of the evolutionary process coming up with something to supersede man and ending with the joking suggestion that man's successor might be the thinking machine, which was being developed at the same time as the means for eliminating humanity, the hydrogen bomb.

  Asimov felt better about the publication of his second Galaxy story (second issue, November 1950), since Gold had been under no first-issue pressure to accept it. Asimov titled it "Potent Stuff." Gold changed the title to "Misbegotten Missionary." Asimov changed it to "Green Patches" when he reprinted it in his own collection, Nightfall and Other Stories. It involved an apparently pleasant planet on which a telepathic life form that could take any shape and could take over any living creature had united all living things into one biological entity. [Asimov may have returned to that concept for the more benign Gaia in Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth, his 1980s return to SF novels and ascension to bestsellerdom discussed in Chapter 8.] It revealed itself on any entity it took over only through two tiny patches of green fur. An expedition to the planet had destroyed itself and its ship when it had realized it was being assimilated. A new expedition realizes just as it is about to dock back on Earth that it may be carrying "green patches." The Captain must decide whether to destroy his ship. But he can find no evidence of live "green patches." Ironically, the live creature had been camouflaged as a piece of wiring. That wiring carried current only when the airlock door was opened, and the creature was electrocuted when the ship docked.

  It was ironic, also, that Asimov realized halfway through the story that he was creating "an infinitely inferior `Who Goes There?'," John W. Campbell's classic horror story of a shape-changer that can imitate any protoplasm it consumes and the basis for two movies titled The Thing. He called Campbell and told him about it. Campbell told him not to worry, that no two stories are exactly the same when written by a competent writer. Asimov continued the story, trying to make it as different as possible from Campbell's "Who Goes There?," but with a broken spirit. To add a final irony, Asimov sent the story to Gold, who had requested it. As Asimov later reported in the collection, the story's acceptance ended "a more-than-seven-year agony of self-doubt."

  Further proof of Asimov's new independence came with Galaxy's serialization of Asimov's new novel, commissioned by Doubleday after the success of Pebble in the Sky, the novel that had begun life as "Grow Old with Me." The new novel was The Stars, Like Dust, which Gold, as was his frequent and not always appreciated practice, retitled. Gold published it as Tyrann (January, February, March 1951).

  "Hostess," Asimov's next story in Galaxy (May 1951), also involved editing problems. Asimov had attended a meeting of the Eastern Science Fiction Association in Newark, New Jersey, and discovered that Ted Sturgeon's upcoming story in Galaxy (perhaps "Rule of Three") shared not only a gimmick with the story that Asimov already had sent to Gold but similar names for the main characters. Eventually, Asimov rewrote the story in Gold's living room, and Gold later changed the name of the woman character. Asimov restored the story to its original form (except for the woman's name) in Nightfall and Other Stories.

  "Hostess" is a novelette of more than usual interest. It was also the first story Asimov experimented with by dictating it to a machine for his wife to type. The novelette retains the Asimovian stamp of problem-solving. It develops as a series of puzzles: 1) Rose Smollett, a fellow in biology at a prestigious research institute, is at age thirty-five a bride of less than a year and wonders sometimes why her husband, Drake, a member of the World Security Board, married her; 2) Drake opposes welcoming into their home a cyanide-breathing alien, Harg Tholan, whose herbivorous race developed from cowlike creatures and who is on Earth ostensibly for biological research; and 3) Tholan raises the delicate question of the Inhibition Death that has begun to affect the four other intelligent races in the Galaxy, stopping their growth and bringing about their deaths within a year.
Only Earthmen, it seems, stop growing when they reach maturity, and only they are carnivores.

  The story contains fascinating speculations about the evolutionary development of a herbivore and about how this might affect psychological and social adaptations. The underlying tension between cyanide-breathers and oxygen-breathers, between herbivores and carnivores, erupts in a grisly scene in which Tholan is deprived of his cyanide by Drake and forced to talk. Tholan reveals a theory that he has not yet shared with anyone else: only Earthmen are immune to the Inhibition Death. He thinks the Inhibition Death is caused by a parasitic kind of life native to Earth that kills when it is spread to aliens who are not adapted to it. He thinks the parasite is spread by young men who disappear into space, but that it must return to Earth to reproduce by using some intermediate host. Drake restores Tholan's cyanide and then kills him.

  When Rose questions him, Drake reveals that Tholan was right, but he insists that the parasite has become symbiotic and is indispensable to humanity's existence, that the absence of the parasite is called cancer. To get rid of the parasite, extraterrestrials would have to eliminate all human life. Drake leaves with Tholan's body, and Rose realizes that he has lied to her, perhaps to avoid killing her. Cancer could not be the absence of the parasite, since it is present in many other kinds of living things. And she realizes too that young men who disappear into space usually do so in the first year of marriage, that the parasite must require close and continuous association with another parasite in order to reproduce, that Drake will not be returning, and that she has been a hostess. She also knows now why Drake married her.

  The story differs from earlier Asimov stories, and from most later ones, for several reasons. One is its complexity; it is difficult to summarize. Second, its primary motivation is not so much the solution of a physical puzzle but the answer to the question of why Drake is behaving so strangely. Its development is one in which a character changes: Rose moves from puzzled happiness to misery. Knowledge, which usually brings satisfaction if not always success in the Asimov story, is no consolation for Rose. And third, the conclusion is ambiguous. Asimov seldom leaves the reader in doubt about the outcome of the situation, but in this story many threads are left dangling. If Drake lied to Rose, what is the truth about the parasite and the Inhibition Death? Will other aliens deduce the truth and descend upon Earth to wipe out the Terran hosts? Will Rose be able to convince her colleagues at the Institute about the parasite, will they launch a research program, and can the parasite be isolated and destroyed? Is the parasite capable of directing human activities, and did it direct Drake's? And so forth. What the story loses in clarity, however, it gains in human resonances. Asimov did not write this kind of story often.

  Astounding published the next Asimov story, "Breeds There a Man. . .?" (June 1951), which is related to "Hostess" in its lack of a definitive ending. A scientific genius working on a force field that could prevent the civilization-destroying effects of an atomic war fears that he will kill himself. He blames this urge to commit suicide on extraterrestrials who are using Earthmen for an experiment and do not want humanity to advance too far. Eventually, at the cost of his health and then his life, the scientist perfects the force shield, leaving unanswered the question of whether his ideas about extraterrestrial manipulation were correct.

  Asimov's next story in Galaxy "C-Chute" (October 1951), was a response to the Korean War, as was "Breeds There a Man. . .?" Both dealt with alien threats to humanity. "C-Chute" also was a bit different from the usual Asimov story, focusing more on character, in this case a group of non-combatant strays in a spaceship captured by aliens. The Terrans quarrel about how to behave toward their captors and about the proper action to take in their circumstances. Finally, the least likely of the group, a precise, mild-mannered bookkeeper for a paper-box company, puts on a spacesuit and makes his way through the C-chute (used to dispose of battle casualties). He goes back through the steam cylinders that control the ship's attitude and into the chlorine-filled alien atmosphere in order to kill the two aliens and reclaim the ship.

  "In a Good Cause," which Asimov wrote for the first anthology of original science fiction, Raymond J. Healy's New Tales of Space and Time (1951), was cited by Asimov as an example of how an author can sometimes write stories that advocate positions the author does not share. Two friends, Richard Altmayer and Geoffrey Stock, take different routes to meet a challenge of competition from herbivorous, communal aliens. Because the aliens have horns and exhale hydrogen sulfide, Earthmen have named them Diaboli. [Asimov's use of the Diaboli illustrates the dangers of influence-tracing. A scholar noting the similarity of the Diaboli to Arthur C. Clarke's Overlords in his 1953 novel Childhood's End might conclude that Clarke was inspired by Asimov. The Overlords, however, were presented first in a story entitled "Guardian Angel" published in 1950, which was expanded into Childhood's End. Both stories, as a matter of fact, may owe a debt to John W. Campbell's 1934 Astounding serial, The Mightiest Machine.] Altmayer becomes a draft resister, later a radical leader. Stock becomes a soldier and then a leading politician. In a series of scattered incidents, Stock uses Altmayer to achieve just the opposite of what Altmayer himself intended to achieve. But each incident prepares the way for the time when at last Earth attacks the Diaboli and defeats them by preventing the other human-settled planets from taking their side. Humanity can expand into the galaxy. In a final irony, Altmayer is released from prison to represent Earth in a United Worlds organization. Altmayer will have a statue raised to him; Stock will be forgotten.

  It seems likely that Asimov did not so much object to the irony in the evaluation of history as to the Machiavellian way in which Stock used Altmayer to achieve his ends and the way in which he slaughtered the Diaboli in the name of human expansion. Asimov's fiction usually followed his convictions, but sometimes, as he pointed out in his autobiography, a story would take the bit in its teeth.

  "The Martian Way" (Galaxy, November 1952) is quintessential Asimov. It survived a request for extensive revision by Gold (Asimov held Gold's requested changes to the insertion of a woman character) to become one of the twenty-two novellas included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume II. The inspiration for the story came out of the Joseph McCarthy era. "It dealt," Asimov wrote in his autobiography, "with Martian colonists with a problem, who were victimized out of a solution by a McCarthy-style politician and who were in this way forced to find a still better solution." When it appeared, Asimov "thought that the story would elicit a mass of mail denouncing my own portrayal of McCarthyism, or supporting it, but I got nothing either one way or the other. It may be that my satire of McCarthy was so subtle that everyone missed it."

  The satire was not that subtle. The "McCarthy-style politician," named John Hilder, is making political capital on Earth out of opposition to space travel, which is costing a great deal of money, he says, for a small return. In particular, he rouses the rabble against letting Martian colonists take Earth's water, which is used mostly for reaction mass. [The situation of Asimov's first Astounding story, "Trends," has progressed both in stage of development and sophistication: spaceflight has moved into the colonization stage and opposition to spaceflight has moved from fundamental religious groups to politicians.] The amount of water used by the colonists is relatively small, but Hilder's campaign succeeds in getting even that closed off. One Martian colonist, Rioz, suggests that the Martians simply take the water, stealthily or by force, from Earth's oceans. But another, Long, says that this is Earth way, the Grounder way, "trying to hold on to the umbilical cord that binds Mars to Earth." The Martian way is to look farther out, where ninety-nine percent of the rest of the matter in the solar system is to be found, including vast amounts of water. Eventually, despite great difficulties, a group of rocket pilots from Mars, whose normal job is reclaiming the metal "shells" or stages left in orbit by ships that have used up their reaction masses, fits a gigantic iceberg from the rings of Saturn with rocket jets and brings it back to Mars. />
  As the mountain of ice is lowered to the surface of Mars, the committee from Earth led by John Hilder is faced with the humiliation of the Martian colonists offering to sell water to Earth. Hilder sees his own political future turning to water along with the campaign rhetoric of his political party, the anti-Wasters. The Martian way is to accept spaceflight as natural, even to consider planets as a kind of spaceship. [Asimov previsions in this story not only "spaceship Earth" but also a later proposal to tow icebergs from the Antarctic to provide supplies of fresh water.] Eventually, "it will be Martians, not planet-bound Earthmen, who will colonize the Galaxy." That too is the Martian way.

  "Sucker Bait" (Astounding, February, March 1954) is a novella about the failure of a colony on a pleasant, Earth-type planet called Junior. A ship is sent to discover what went wrong. One member of the expedition is temperamental Mark Annuncio of the Mnemonic Service, a young man whose ability to remember everything he has ever read makes him an invaluable resource in a galaxy with nearly 100,000 inhabited planets, where all sorts of information can be lost. He also has hunches based on the correlation of information he has memorized. One correlation leads him to a violent course of action that forces the crew off the planet in a hurry. Annuncio and the man nominally responsible for him, Oswald Mayer Sheffield, are placed on shipboard trial for mutiny and are almost railroaded into a death sentence. Finally, Sheffield persuades the crew to hear Annuncio's testimony. Annuncio reveals that the danger on Junior is in the dust: it contains beryllium that kills by deranging enzymatic reactions. The crew might all be doomed. [Annuncio's intuition may anticipate Golan Trevise's "right" decisions in Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth.]