Caves of Steel - Isaac Asimov [2]
I went on to write four more robot stories for Astounding in the 1940s. They were “Catch That Rabbit,” “Escape” (which Campbell called “Paradoxical Escape” because two years before he had published a story with “Escape” as the title), “Evidence,” and “The Evitable Conflict.” These appeared in the February 1944, August 1945, September 1946, and June 1950 issues of Astounding.
By 1950, important publishing houses, notably Doubleday and Company, were beginning to publish hardcover science fiction. In January 1950, Doubleday published my first book, the science-fiction novel Pebble in the Sky, and I was hard at work on a second novel.
It occurred to Fred Pohl, who was my agent for a brief period at that time, that perhaps a book could be made out of my robot stories. Doubleday was not interested in short-story collections at the time, but a very small publishing house, Gnome Press, was.
On June 8, 1950, the collection was handed to Gnome Press, and the title I gave it was Mind and Iron. The publisher shook his head.
“Let’s call it I, Robot,” he said.
“We can’t,” I said. “Eando Binder wrote a short story with that title ten years ago.”
“Who cares?” said the publisher (though that is a bowdlerized version of what he really said), and I allowed myself, rather uneasily, to be persuaded. I, Robot was my second book, and it came out just before the end of 1950.
The book contained my eight robot stories from Astounding, with their order rearranged to make a more logical progression. In addition, I included “Robbie,” my first story, because I liked it despite Campbell’s rejection.
I had written three other robot stories in the 1940s that Campbell had either rejected or never seen, but these were not in the direct path of progression of the stories, so I left them out. These, however, and other robot stories written in the decades since I, Robot, were included in later collections—all of them, without exception, appeared in The Complete Robot, published by Doubleday in 1982.
I, Robot did not make a big splash on publication, but it sold steadily, if slowly, year after year. Within five years, it had come out in an Armed Forces edition, in a cheaper hardcover edition, in a British edition, and in a German edition (my first foreign-language appearance). In 1956, it was even published in a paperback edition by New American Library.
The only trouble was that Gnome Press was just barely surviving, and it never did get around to giving me clear semiannual statements, or much in the way of payments. (That went for my three Foundation books, which Gnome Press also published.)
In 1961, Doubleday became aware of the fact that Gnome Press was having trouble, and they arranged to take over I, Robot (and the Foundation books, too). From then on, all the books did much better. In fact, I, Robot has remained in print ever since it was first published. That’s thirty-three years now. In 1981, it was even sold to the movies, although no motion picture has yet been made. It has also appeared in eighteen different foreign languages that I know of, including Russian and Hebrew.
But I’m getting way ahead of the story.
Let’s go back to 1952, at which time I, Robot was just plodding along as a Gnome Press book, and I had no hint of any real success.
By that time, new top-notch science-fiction magazines had come out and the field was in one of its periodic “booms.” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction appeared in 1949, and Galaxy Science Fiction in 1950. With that John Campbell lost his monopoly of the field, and the “Golden Age” of the 1940s was over.
I began to write for Horace Gold, the editor of Galaxy, and with some relief, too. For a period of eight years, I had written for Campbell exclusively and I had come to feel that I was a one-editor writer and that if anything happened