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They must find a way to propel the wreckage toward the asteroid. One of them finally rigs a method of releasing water retained in the wreck as a jet of steam: even at the low temperature of space, water boils in a vacuum. |
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"The Callistan Menace," the first story Asimov wrote, also was a puzzle, but not much of one. Originally, it had been titled "Stowaway" because a space-struck boy of about thirteen stows away aboard a ship heading for the mystery world Callisto, a satellite of Jupiter. Crewmen are in danger of being killed by giant Callistan magnet worms when the boy emerges in a non-metallic rubber spacesuit to rescue them. |
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Asimov's tenth story and his first in Astounding, "Trends," was not a puzzle story and seems comparatively weaker for that reason. It was about the first steps toward spaceflight, and its chief claim to significance was its prediction of resistance to space exploration. Campbell may have liked it not only for its social theme but for the fact that the resistance to space-flight was led by an evangelical religious group and its charismatic leader. |
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Over the next year Asimov wrote nine more stories and sold about half of them. He was published in Amazing, Astonishing, Cosmic, Future, Super Science, and Planet, but not in Astounding again until he wrote his nineteenth story, "Homo Sol" (September 1940). The story is important in that it is in some ways prefatory to the Foundation stories, as is the earlier written but later-published "Black Friar of the Flames" (Planet, Spring 1942). "Homo Sol" inspired in Asimov a resolution not to deal with aliens and thus to avoid Campbell's biases and his own futile arguments. That resolution may have led to Asimov's all-human galaxy, which at the time was a distinctive aspect of the Foundation stories. |
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July 29, 1940, Asimov notes in The Early Asimov, was a turning point in his publishing career. Up to that day he had written twenty-two stories in twenty-five months. Of these he had sold (or was to sell) thirteen; nine never sold and no longer exist. After this day, except for two short-short stories, he never again wrote a science-fiction story that he could not sell. |
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"Not Final!" (Astounding, October 1941) is the first nonrobot, non-Foundation story after "Nightfall" that hints at Asimov's future capabilities. Like "Nightfall," the theme of "Not Final!" has magnitude. Human spaceships have achieved interplanetary flight. Inhabitants of Jupiter have been contacted by radio, but once they learn that humans are not Jovians they send a final message that humans are vermin and will be destroyed. With all the resources of mighty Jupiter and a technology equal to that of Earth, the Jovians cannot be stopped. |
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