Pebble in the Sky

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1. shagieSep 2026
   Have you ever read "Travel by Wire!"? It was the first story that Arthur C. Clarke published. It's... youthful in its writing.

   Or how about Pebble in the Sky?

   > Boucher and McComas were disappointed by the novel, saying that despite Asimov's good ideas, "his heavy treatment and routine plot are disappointing.

   Try to find a copy of The Big U by Neal Stephenson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_U ("When Stephenson's Snow Crash was published in 1992, the book that became a best-seller and vaulted him to fame, The Big U was out of print and Stephenson was content to leave it that way. When original editions began selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars, he relented and allowed The Big U to be republished, saying that the only thing worse than people reading the book was paying that much to read it.")

   Or Sundiver being a much weaker book than the rest of the Uplift series.

   Or A Planet Called Treason by Orson Scott Card (which was even worse when I reread it as an adult).

   Old Man's War was Scalzi's first "real" story... one that he had in the back of his mind to write in his college years.

   He has matured as a writer since then.

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2. staticman2May 2025
   >what you speak of is difference between literature and mere communication.

   So a novel is not literature unless it uses your preferred writing style?

   >But mud fog BLEAKNESS gestures here maybe to social decay, anomie, listlessness, an eternal stupor, impotence of characters and so on.

   That passage doesn't introduce any "characters". Perhaps Lord Chancellor will turn out to be one of the novel's characters, but that remains to be seen.

   > The painting has a point for the plot AND your pleasure.

   There's no need to be so confrontational.

   Isaac Asimov is nowhere close to being my favorite writer but I offer this for your amusement. In his autobiography "I, Asimov" he talks about his simple writing style:

   >Before Pebble in the Sky was published, Walter Bradbury asked me to do another novel. I did and sent in two sample chapters. The trouble was that now that I was a published writer, I tried to be literary, as I had in that never-to-be- forgotten writing class in high school. Not nearly as badly, of course, but badly enough. Brad gently sent those two chapters back and put me on the right track.

   >"Do you know," he said, "how Hemingway would say, 'The sun rose the next morning'?"

   >"No," I said, anxiously (I had never read Hemingway) "How would he say it, Brad?"

   >Brad said, "He would say, 'The sun rose the next morning.'

   >That was enough. It was the best literary lesson I ever had and it took just ten seconds. I did my second novel, which was The Stars, Like Dust-, writing it plainly, and Brad took it.

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3. svieiraJul 2021
   And from here, it is a very small step (practically speaking) to The sixty of A Pebble in the Sky

   https://archive.org/details/pebbleinsky00asim/ https://archive.org/details/podcast_dimension-x_dimension-x-...

   For those who haven't heard or read it, the 60 is a law on the Earth of the future that requires that on your sixtieth birthday you report to a medical center for euthanization. Those who refuse are tracked down and forcibly euthanized.

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4. tunesmithAug 2018
   Here's the order I read them in:

     I, Robot (1950)
     Foundation (1951)
     Foundation and Empire (1952)
     Second Foundation (1953)
     The Caves Of Steel (1954)
     The Naked Sun (1957)
     The Robots Of Dawn (1983)
     Foundation’s Edge (1982)
     Foundation and Earth (1986)
     Robots And Empire (1985)
     The End of Eternity (1955)
   

   I haven't actually finished the final two because it took me a while to find Robots And Empire. I'll have to reread from the beginning.

   Here’s Asimov’s recommended order. This one is pretty much chronological for characters, I think, which would spoil some narrative twists. Kind of like how watching the Star Wars prequels first would spoil The Empire Strikes Back.

     Either The Complete Robot (1982) *or* I, Robot (1950)
     The Caves Of Steel
     The Naked Sun
     The Robots Of Dawn
     Robots And Empire
     The Currents Of Space (1952)
     The Stars, Like Dust (1951)
     Pebble In The Sky (1950)
     Prelude To Foundation (1988)
     Forward the Foundation (1993)
     Foundation
     Foundation and Empire
     Second Foundation
     Foundation’s Edge
     Foundation and Earth
   

   And here is an Expanded Chronological order, which includes books written by other authors after Asimov died:

     I, Robot
     The Rest of the Robots (1964)
     The Complete Robot (1982)
     Robot Dreams (1986)
     Robot Visions (1990)
     The Positronic Man (1992) (co-written by Robert Silverberg)
     Mother Earth (1948) (minor inconsistencies)
     The Caves Of Steel
     The Naked Sun
     Mirror Image (1972)
     The Robots of Dawn
     Mirage (Mark W. Tiedemann) (2000)
     Chimera (Mark W. Tiedemann) (2001)
     Aurora (Mark W. Tiedemann) (2002)
     Have Robot, Will Travel (Alexander C. Irvine) (2005)
     Robots And Empire
     Caliban (Roger MacBride Allen) (1993)
     Inferno (Roger MacBride Allen) (1994)
     Utopia (Roger MacBride Allen) (1996)
     The Stars, Like Dust
     The Currents Of Space 
     Pebble In The Sky
     Prelude To Foundation
     Foundation’s Fear (Gregory Benford) (1997)
     Forward the Foundation (MINUS the final section of the epilogue)
     Foundation and Chaos (Greg Bear) (1998)
     Foundation’s Triumph (David Brin) (1999)
     Foundation
     Foundation and Empire
     Second Foundation
     Foundation’s Edge
     Foundation and Earth
     The End Of Eternity (not really in order apparently, kind of in its own time)
     Nemesis (1989) (not really in order, kind of on its own)
   

   I got these lists from somewhere online years back, I think a stackoverflow site, but I'd avoid them because they also talk about spoilers even in listing the names of the books.
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5. RegBarclayMar 2018
   Also found in Asimov's Pebble in the Sky.
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6. coldteaOct 2016
   >His older novels such as the later Foundation series were crap. Fad idea of the day (Gaia) instead of exploring a topic a bit more in depth (advantages of large populations in combating stasis).

   While the writing was a little pulpy (then again, it always has been), the ideas were worth exploring. Doesn't matter if it was based on a "fad idea of the day", it was still a concept worth exploring in the context of the series. Besides sci-fi writers have done the Gaia idea dozens of times, way before it became a fad. His classic "robot" stories, on the other hand, I always found ho-hum.

   In any case, the second foundation series is no worse in writing than the "Pebble in the Sky" -- and that was his very first novel, after tons of short stories.

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