The Complete Stories_ Volume 1 - Isaac Asimov [0]
ISAAC ASIMOV
THE COMPLETE STORIES
Volume 1 of 2
FOUNDATION, DOUBLEDAY, and the portrayal of the letter F are trademarks of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This volume contains the complete contents of the previously published collections Earth Is Room Enough, Nine Tomorrows, and Nightfall and Other Stories.
This edition copyright © 1990 by Nightfall, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
ISBH 0-385-41606-7
version history
Contents
Isaac Asimov - The Complete Stories 01 - Volume 1 of 2
Introduction
Part I: Earth is Room Enough
The Dead Past (A Multivac Story)
The Foundation of S.F Success (Poem)
Franchise (A Multivac Story)
Gimmicks Three (Original title: "The Brazen Locked Room.")
Kid Stuff
The Watery Place
Living Space
The Message
Satisfaction Guaranteed (A Susan Calvin Story Robot Story)
Hell-Fire
The Last Trump
The Fun They Had
Jokester (A Multivac Story)
The Immortal Bard
Someday (A Multivac Story)
The Author's Ordeal (Poem)
Dreaming Is a Private Thing
Part II: Nine Tomorrows
Profession
The Feeling of Power
The Dying Night (Wendell Urth)
Part One
Part Two
I’m in Marsport Without Hilda
The Gentle Vultures
All the Troubles of the World (A Multivac Story)
Spell My Name with an S
The Last Question (A Multivac Story)
The Ugly Little Boy
Part III: Nightfall and Other Stories
Nightfall
Green Patches (Original title: "Misbegotten Missionary.")
Hostess
"Breeds There a Man?"
C-Chute
"In a Good Cause—"
1— June 17, 2755
2— September 5, 2788
3— December 21, 2800
What If—
Sally
Flies
"Nobody Here But—"
It's Such a Beautiful Day
Strikebreaker (Original title: "Male Strikebreaker.")
Insert Knob A in Hole B
The Up-to-Date Sorcerer
Unto the Fourth Generation
What Is This Thing Called Love? (Original title: Playboy and the Slime God)
The Machine That Won the War
My Son, the Physicist
Eyes Do More than See
Segregationist
Part IV: Poems from Nine Tomorrows
I Just Make Them Up, See!
Rejection Slips
About the Author
End of Isaac Asimov the Complete Stories 01
Introduction
I have been writing short stories for fifty-one years and I haven't yet quit. In addition to the hundreds of short stories I have published, there are at least a dozen in press waiting to be published, and two stories written and not yet submitted. So I have by no means retired.
There is, however, no way one can publish short stories for this length of time without understanding that the time left to him is limited. In the words of the song: "Forevermore is shorter than before." It is time, therefore, for Doubleday to pull the strings together and get all my fiction—short stories and novels, too—into a definitive form and in uniform bindings, both in hard and soft covers.
It may sound conceited of me to say so (I am frequently accused of being conceited), but my fiction generally has been popular from the start and has continued to be well received through the years. To locate any one story, however, that you no longer have and wish you did, or to find one you have heard about but have missed is no easy task. My stories appeared originally in any one of many magazines, the original issues of which are all but unobtainable. They then appeared in any of a multiplicity of anthologies and collections, copies of which are almost as unobtainable.
It is Doubleday's intention to make this multivolume collection definitive and uniform in the hope that the science fiction public, the mystery public (for my many mysteries will also be collected), and libraries as well will seize upon them ravenously and clear their book shelves to make room for Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories.
We begin in this volume with two of my early collections from the 1950s, Earth Is Room Enough and Nine Tomorrows. The former includes such favorites of