Contents

 

foundation, doubleday,and the portrayal of the letter Fare trademarks of Doubleday, a division of Bantam DoubledayDell 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 previoush/ published collections Earth Is Room Enough, NineTomorrows, 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

 

Introduction  vii

The Dead Past  3

The Foundation of S.F. Success  41

Franchise  43

Gimmicks Three  57

Kid Stuff  62

The Watery Place  73

Living Space  77

The Message  89

Satisfaction Guaranteed  91

Hell-Fire   104

The Last Trump   106

The Fun They Had   120

Jokester  123

The Immortal Bard   135

Someday  138

The Author's Ordeal   146

Dreaming Is a Private Thing  149

Profession   162

The Feeling of Power  208

The Dying Night  217

I'min Marsport Without Hilda  239

The Gentle Vultures  250

All the Troubles of the World  263

Spell My Name with an 5  277

The Last Question  290

The Ugly Little Boy  301

Nightfall  334

Green Patches  363

Hostess  376

"Breeds There a Man . . . ?"  408

C-Chute  438

"In a Good Cause-"  468

What If-  489

Sally  500

Flies  515

"Nobody Here but-"  521

It's Such a Beautiful Day  531

Strikebreaker  550

Insert Knob A in Hole B  561

The Up-to-Date Sorcerer  563

Unto the Fourth Generation  575

What Is This Thing Called Love?  582

The Machine That Won the War  593

My Son, the Physicist  598

Eyes Do More than See  602

Segregationist  605

I Just Make Them Up, See!  610

Rejection Slips  613

 

Introduction

 

I have been writing short stories for fifty-one years and I haven't yet quit. Inaddition to the hundreds of short stories I have published, there are at leasta 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 beingconceited), 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 definitiveand 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 IsaacAsimav: The Complete Stories.

We begin in this volume with two of my early collections from the 1950s, Earth Is Room Enoughand Nine Tomorrows.

The former includes such favorites of mine as "Franchise," which deals with the ultimate election day; "Living Space," which gives every family a world of its own; "The Fun They Had," my most anthologized story; "Jokester," whose ending I bet you don't anticipate if you've never read the story before; and "Dreaming Is a Private Thing," concerning which Robert A. Heinlein accused me of making money out of my own neuroses.

Nine Tomorrows,the personal favorite of all my collections, contains not one story I don't consider to be excellent examples of my productions of the 1950s. In particular, there is "The Last Question," which, of all the stories I have written, is my absolute favorite.

Then there is "The Ugly Little Boy," my third-favorite story. My tales tend to be cerebral, but I count on this one to bring about a tear or two. (To find out which is the second-favorite of my stories, you'll have to read suc­cessive volumes of this collection.) "The Feeling of Power" is another fre­quently anthologized piece and is rather prophetic, considering it was writ­ten before anyone was thinking of pocket computers. "All the Troubles of the World" is a suspense story and "The Dying Night" is a mystery based, alas, on an astronomical "fact" now known to be quite mistaken.