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sold humorous science-fiction verse based on literary models, mostly Gilbert and Sullivan, as well as, beginning in 1958, monthly science articles, which he claimed as his favorite writing and subsequently was to collect in many of his books. Galaxy, through Gold's requests, ideas, and goading and through the three cents a word payment, escalating with the fourth story to three and a half cents and up, helped Asimov to produce some of his best fiction. |
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As Asimov mentions in his autobiography, he had grown beyond Campbell: |
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In part it was because he [Campbell] had taken a wrong turning. He had moved into dianetics and from there into a series of other follies, and there was no way in which I could follow him. Furthermore, he could not separate his personal views from the magazine, but strove to incorporate those views into the stories he elicited from the authors, and many authors were only too delighted to comply and to "press Campbell's buttons." I could not do it any more than I could comply with his penchant for human superiority over extraterrestrials in earlier years. |
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Second, there were new markets opening up, and I wanted to branch out. . . . |
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Six of the first eight issues of Galaxy included works by Asimov: two short stories, a novelette, and a three-part serial. The first story, in the first issue of Galaxy (October 1950), was "Darwinian Pool Room." It consisted of a conversation speculating about the possibility of the evolutionary process coming up with something to supersede man and ending with the joking suggestion that man's successor might be the thinking machine, which was being developed at the same time as the means for eliminating humanity, the hydrogen bomb. |
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Asimov felt better about the publication of his second Galaxy story (second issue, November 1950), since Gold had been under no first-issue pressure to accept it. Asimov titled it "Potent Stuff." Gold changed the title to "Misbegotten Missionary." Asimov changed it to "Green Patches" when he reprinted it in his own collection, Nightfall and Other Stories. It involved an apparently pleasant planet on which a telepathic life form that could take any shape and could take over any living creature had united all living things into one biological entity. [Asimov may have returned to that concept for the more benign Gaia in Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth, his 1980s return to SF novels and ascension to bestsellerdom discussed in Chapter 8.] It revealed itself on any entity it took over only through two tiny patches of green fur. An expedition to the planet had destroyed itself and its ship when it had |
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