21 June

Isaac Asimov submits his first SF story, ‘The Cosmic Corkscrew’, to John W. Campbell of Astounding Science Fiction

1938 Asimov was born (the exact date is uncertain) in Petrovichi in the USSR, in a period when it was unlucky to be a Russian Jew. His family emigrated to the USA, where the infant Isaac was naturalised in 1928. Asimov Sr. ran a candy store in Brooklyn. Isaac grew up a brilliant, over-achieving high-school pupil, going on to take degrees in chemistry at Columbia University, culminating in a PhD in 1948. A brilliant academic career was in prospect.

An early fan of pulp SF (much to his father’s disgust, although the Asimov candy stores had a profitable sideline in the product), Isaac – a young man imbued with a strong sense of his intellectual omnipotence – tried his hand with a short story in the genre. The 9,000-word ‘The Cosmic Corkscrew’ was written between May 1937 and June 1938. It draws, clearly, on the last chapter of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Asimov’s ‘traveller’ (or ‘chronic argonaut’, as Wells called his hero) travels into the far future to find earth deserted. He cannot, due to the corkscrew nature of time, return to find out what went wrong.

Asimov submitted the story on 21 June 1938 to John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction. At that time he was the most powerful arbiter of taste in the genre. Asimov’s tale was not to Campbell’s taste. Ferociously right-wing, he perhaps found it too glum. It was rejected, the manuscript was lost, and the story has never seen the light of print.

Much else did appear with Asimov’s name on it. His first science-fiction novel, A Pebble in the Sky (earth becomes radioactive following nuclear war), was published in 1950 – a period when nuclear war was imminently expected and middle-class America was investing in fallout shelters. In that same year, 1950, there appeared Asimov’s most famous volume, I, Robot, a collection of short stories published over previous years, expounding the author’s ‘three laws of Robotics’.

The most prolific of writers, Asimov published some 60 works of SF, fifteen crime mysteries (which he began writing in 1956), a hundred or more popularising works of ‘science fact’, and scholarly treatises on Shakespeare, the Bible, and quantum mechanics – 600 titles in all. His collected papers, donated to his Boston University alma mater, occupy 71 metres of shelf space. Elsewhere in the library there are printed volumes by Isaac Asimov in nine out of the ten Dewey Decimal classification categories.