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Page 189
8
The Best-Selling Author
On January 15, 1981, Asimov started on a path that would take him where he had never expected to arrive, what 261 earlier books had taught him not to expect, to a place on the nation's best-seller lists. On that date Hugh O'Neill, Asimov's new editor at Doubleday, asked him to see Betty Prashker, an editor higher in the editorial chain of command. Prashker told Asimov that Doubleday wanted him to write a novel. In his memoir Asimov recorded his typical objections, which Prashker brushed aside by saying that Doubleday was going to send him a contract with a large advance, which four days later turned out to be the biggest Asimov had ever received, $50,000, ten times as much as he usually got from Doubleday.
The evening of his conversation with Prashker, Asimov got a telephone call from Pat LoBrutto, the editor in charge of science fiction at Doubleday, who said, "When Betty said `a novel,' she meant `a science-fiction novel'; and when we say `a science-fiction novel' we mean `a Foundation novel.'"
Asimov protested that he didn't know if he could write novels any more (The Gods Themselves was almost a decade in the past, and, aside from the novelization of Fantastic Voyage, it had come 15 years after his previous novel, The Naked Sun). Moreover, he said that Doubleday would lose its shirt with that kind of advance.
But Doubleday brushed aside his objections and after four months of finishing up other projects, Asimov sat down to come up with an idea by re-reading The Foundation Trilogy. He found it a page-turner, having forgotten much of how it was going to turn out. But he also recognized its flaws, particularly its lack of action and over-dependence on dialogue. Although he does not say so in his memoir, in an article for Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, which later was reprinted as an introduction for the 1982 edition of The Foundation Trilogy, he wrote:

 
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