Buy Jupiter, and other stories
Darwinian Pool Room Day of the Hunters Shah Guido G. Button, Button The Monkey's Finger Everest The Pause Let's Not Each an Explorer Blank! Does a Bee Care? Silly Asses Buy Jupiter! A Statue for Father Rain, Rain, Go Away Founding Father Exile to Hell Key Item The Proper Study 2430 A.D. The Greatest Asset Take a Match Thiotimoline to the Stars Light Verse
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What Hacker News says
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_Jupiter
>"Buy Jupiter!" is a humorous science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It was first published in the May 1958 issue of Venture Science Fiction Magazine, and reprinted in the 1975 collection Buy Jupiter and Other Stories. The original title of the story was "It Pays," though it was never published under this name.
>Plot summary: Government officials of the Terrestrial Federation negotiate to sell the planet Jupiter to an energy-based alien race. The beings refuse to reveal their plans for its use and whether or not they are at war with other similar beings. Eventually, the aliens reveal that they wish to suspend letters in Jupiter's atmosphere as an advertising slogan (i.e. Jupiter is to be used as an advertising billboard), to be seen by passing spacecraft. The main Earth negotiator reveals to his colleagues that he has outsmarted the aliens, who clearly are not experienced hagglers, having neglected the other Jovian planets. So when rival beings come to do business, Saturn, with its fancy rings, can be sold for an even higher price.
- I read this and expressed confusion to a colleague. She said "It's humor." and my only reply is - "Are you sure?"
Asimov once wrote[0] that it's possible to try to write suspense, miss and be slightly suspenseful, you can try to write horror, miss, and be slightly horrific. But try to write humor and miss, and what you get is of no value at all.
[0] This is badly reconstruct from memory - I'll try to find the reference[1] ...
[1] This isn't the exact reference I had in mind, but it's close:
"There is no way of being almost funny or mildly funny or fairly funny or tolerably funny. You are either funny or not funny and there is nothing in between. And usually it is the writer who thinks he is funny and the reader who thinks he isn't."
-- Buy Jupiter and Other Stories (1975), p. 33 (in my copy).
- Contained in "Buy Jupiter and Other Stories" Available on amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Jupiter-Other-Stories-Isaac-Asimov/dp...)
