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their own was created by a clever bureaucrat who used the turgid bureaucratic channels of communication and methods of operation for his own purposes. That must have appealed to Campbell's conviction that "it's all a matter of knowing how." |
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Asimov was busy through the rest of 1944, 1945, and 1946 with robot and Foundation stories. In addition, he was drafted into the Army in September 1945, and released a year later. This period saw him produce "The Mule," "Evidence," "Little Lost Robot," and "Now You See It. . . ." Then he wrote another non-robot, non-Foundation story, "No Connection'' (Astounding, June 1948). It too was about aliens, in this case intelligent bears who have succeeded to the mastery of North America after humanity wiped itself out in atomic wars. But in Europe anthropoids have evolved into a new kind of humanoid civilization and pose a threat, including even atomic warfare, to the peaceful, cooperative ursine civilization. An ursine archeologist, investigating radioactive ruins, finds evidence of a previous human civilization, which he calls "Primate Primeval," but he rejects the notion that any connection would exist between the sordid present of neutron bombardments and the glorious, mysterious past. |
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Both "Blind Alley" and "No Connection" were problem stories and were modestly successful insofar as they represented effective problem-solving. After Asimov's first non-fiction article, a research spoof, "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" (Astounding, March 1948), which was important to his future career, Asimov took a gamble on a novella, "Grow Old with Me," for Startling Stories, partly to prove to himself that he was not a one-editor author. Its rejection by Startling and then Astounding was a blow to his writing ambitions. He stopped writing for a year while he completed work on his Ph.D. and accepted a job to do post-doctoral research on anti-malarial drugs. |
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Asimov then produced a time-travel paradox story titled "The Red Queen's Race" (Astounding, January 1949), in which a crazed researcher attempts to send back to Hellenistic times a chemical textbook translated into Greek so that the Greeks can build a stronger civilization that will withstand barbarian attacks. After a long effort to undo the action, the assistant professor of philosophy who translated the textbook tells investigators not to worry. The textbook was sent back to this world. |
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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 |
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