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Page vii
Epigraph
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. . . .
In the introduction to the 1982 edition of The Foundation Trilogy, Asimov included an introduction that contained the following account:
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. . . about the end of May, I picked up my own copy of The Foundation Trilogy and began reading.
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I read it with mounting uneasiness. I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever did. All three volumes, all the nearly quarter of a million words, consisted of thoughts and conversation. No action. No physical suspense. . . .
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I was on the edge of deciding it was all a terrible mistake and of insisting on giving back the money, when (quite by accident, I swear) I came across some sentences by science-fiction writer and critic James Gunn, who, in connection with the Foundation series, said, "Action and romance have little to do with the success of the Trilogy virtually all the action takes place offstage, and the romance is almost invisible but the stories provide a detective-story fascination with the permutations and reversals of ideas."
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Oh, well, if what was needed were "permutations and reversals of ideas," then that I could supply. Panic receded. . . .

 
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