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novel offers an effective climactic scene in which Biron resists Aratap's manipulations. |
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The Currents of Space led Asimov back to the theme and substance that he was to celebrate in his two robot novels. He described his next novel as "a complicated story of interstellar intrigue and racism." It too began as a novel for Doubleday, which Bradbury approved in idea form on December 28, 1950. On April 4, 1951, he offered Asimov a contract on the basis of the material he had seen, skipping the option phase. It was another step forward for Asimov. Asimov decided to offer the serialization rights to Campbell, since he felt guilty about the frequent appearance of his work in Galaxy. |
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The novel took Asimov more than a year to write. He was also busy with his first textbook, a collaboration with two Boston University School of Medicine colleagues, William C. Boyd and Burnham S. Walker, that soured him on collaborating but whetted his appetite for science writing; the first of the juvenile novels he would write under the name of Paul French, David Starr: Space Ranger; and various shorter projects. He finished The Currents of Space on March 30, 1952, and learned on April 17 that Campbell had accepted it for serialization. |
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The Currents of Space is also a novel that conceals information from the reader. In the Prolog, a character identified as "the man from Earth," who works for the Interstellar Spatioanalytic Bureau (I.S.B.), is being detained by an unnamed man. The Earthman wants to broadcast information that a planet named Florina is to be destroyed. The second man thinks that would cause panic and do no good. The second man says he will remove the Earthman's anxiety with a psychic probe, but darkness comes over the Earthman's mind. "Some of it never lifted again. It took years for even parts of it to lift." |
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Rik, a mentally incapacitated man known to others as "Crazy Rik," has turned up on a planet that the reader soon learns is Florina. He has been adopted by a childless woman named Valona March, who has nursed him back to health and to some awareness of what is going on around him. She knows Rik's mind has been "turned off," that he once was an educated man. She gets him a job in the kyrt mills, where a kind of miracle fiber is made into cloth. Gradually he begins to remember things from the past: first, that he had a job analyzing "Nothing," and second, that everybody on Florina is going to die. Valona wants him to forget and to stay where he is because she has found out from a doctor she took him to see (who died a week later in a gyro-crash) that Rik had |
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