Isaac Asimov- Pebble in the Sky
Isaac Asimov always seemed to be around at my nerdiest teenage moments. I remember spending my lunch breaks in the high school library reading his two volume autobiography so that I wouldn’t have to encounter other people. His proud geekiness was inspiring. Also, I was a devotee of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. He’d lent his name to and wrote short essays or the magazine, but the fiction published within was a far cry from his own. It was far more literary and nuanced. I got the idea that Asimov didn’t really care for it.
I never got around to reading much of Asimov’s fiction, beyond his famous stories “Nightfall” and his series of futuristic detective novels beginning with “The Caves of Steel.” In fact, I only recently read “The Foundation Trilogy,” the work for which he is best known. It appeared as a run of linked short stories and novellas in the pages of Astounding Magazine throughout the 1940s that were collected into three books in the early 50s. Asimov would revisit the universe he’d created decades later, when he returned to writing Science Fiction, having abandoned it for quite a few years to concentrate on popular science books. The books of his later years were dedicated to connecting the books from the 40s and 50s into a Future History, starting with the robot stories (collected in “I, Robot”) and novels, continuing to the Galactic Empire books, and ending with the Foundation Series, which charts the decline and fall of the empire and the preservation of its values throughout the long dark ages that follow.
“Pebble in the Sky” was Asimov’s first published novel and it is grouped with the Galactic Empire books. It is a somewhat incoherent story in which a present day Earthman is transported into a strange distant future where Earth, now a radioactive planet, is nearly enslaved to the Empire. Of course scientists and researchers are the heroes of the novel and the action moves in the jerky, accelerated manner of much early SF, with many philosophical and scientific discussions taking main stage, while actual events and drama are barely described.
The idea appears here, as it later did in Battlestar Galactica and probably a thousand other places, that humanity has colonized the galaxy and forgotten where its original home world even is. Of course, the Earth is a dying, radioactive place, but it must be saved!