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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. |
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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. |
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"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." |
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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 |
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