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Walter Bradbury, the editor in charge of the new science-fiction line at Doubleday, called and told Asimov's wife that Doubleday was accepting the novel and had scheduled it for the following January. |
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When Asimov returned the corrected proofs to Bradbury on November 4, he described a new novel he might write. Bradbury told him to go ahead and write two chapters and an outline, and on that basis he would judge whether he wanted to offer a contract. Asimov was launched as a novelist and a writer of books. Books were to be the source of his future success and reputation and fortune, and Pebble in the Sky was to be number one in a list that would grow to 470. Before the year was over, Greenberg had offered Asimov a contract for publication of a collection of his robot stories, and Doubleday, an option on his new novel. Even this early in his book-publishing career, Asimov could look back on the rejection of "Grow Old with Me" by Merwin two and a half years earlier as the best thing that could have happened. "Doubleday," he recalled in his autobiography, "had found [the manuscript] more valuable because it had not been published and they might not have taken it if it had been. Since I wouldn't trade ten magazine appearances for that book, I now realized that Merwin had, all unwittingly, done me an enormous favor by rejecting it." |
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What was the novel that formed the cornerstone of Asimov's gigantic edifice of books? Asimov described it in these terms: |
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It dealt with a tailor who managed to get transferred into a future in which old people underwent euthanasia unless they could prove themselves useful to society. The problem was to work out a way in which an old tailor from the past could prove useful enough to a society of the future to be kept alive. |
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The plot is more complicated than usual for Asimov fiction. The story develops along several simultaneous lines, beginning with the accidental translation (by means of an unrelated laboratory incident) of a sixty-two-year-old retired tailor named Joseph Schwartz to an Earth thousands of years in the future. That Earth has been turned radioactive by atomic wars so remote that the wars themselves have been forgotten. Earth is a neglected and detested world, poor in resources and populated by only 20 million people. It exists in the early period of Asimov's Galactic Empire, which is described at the time of its fall and disintegration in the Foundation stories. The Empire consists of 200 million inhabited planets. Fifty more each day are achieving provincial status. From the heart of that Empire a distinguished young archeologist |
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