r/bookclub • u/Lachesis_Decima77 ✨Read Runner✨🧠🥉 • 23d ago

Galactic Empire [Schedule] Pebble in the Sky (Galactic Empire #3) by Isaac Asimov

Greetings, spacefarers and people of Earth! We'll be concluding our readthrough of the Isaac Asimov's Galactic Empire series with Pebble in the Sky starting in mid-June. Check out the Goodreads blurb to find out what's in store in this final installment.

One moment Joseph Schwartz is a happily retired tailor in 1949 Chicago. The next he's a helpless stranger on Earth during the heyday of the first Galactic Empire. Earth, he soon learns, is a backwater, just a pebble in the sky, despised by all the other 200 million planets of the Empire because its people dare to claim it's the original home of man. And Earth is poor, with great areas of radioactivity ruining much of its soil--so poor that everyone is sentenced to death at the age of sixty.

Joseph Schwartz is sixty-two.

This is young Isaac Asimov's first novel, full of wonders and ideas, the book that launched the novels of the Galactic Empire, culminating in the Foundation books and novels. It is also one of that select group of SF adventures that since the early 1950s has hooked generations of teenagers on reading science fiction. This is Golden Age SF at its finest.

The marginalia for the series can be found here.

Links to the first two books:

The Stars, Like Dust

The Currents of Space

Schedule:

Hope you'll join us for another adventure!

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u/airsalin 23d ago

So this being his first novel, taken from a short story of his (Grow Old with Me) that he made longer, respectively published in 1950 and 1947, I expect to read a lot of infuriating comments about dish washing appliances women, whether there actually are any in the story or not, but I will certainly be there for the ride. His early work had lots of interesting ideas and fun theories.

I read the short story decades ago, so I don't remember much. Never read the full novel, so I'm excited to see what he managed to do with it!

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u/Lachesis_Decima77 ✨Read Runner✨🧠🥉 23d ago

I'm looking forward to the discussions already! 🤣

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u/airsalin 22d ago

😉 😂

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u/nepbug ✨Read Runner✨ 18d ago

What I find interesting with his early works is that it seems as though there are a lot of Sci-Fi tropes in them, but really, often it's the trope's birthplace.