And now we settle in for the second part of the Good Doctor's second novel! Join us as we dust The Stars, Like Dust— with commentary like powdered sugar on a doughnut! Let's chat about chapters nine through fourteen!

"The Podcast Was Located in a Little Niche Just Outside the Cabin"

If this novel had been feeling a little non-Asenion for your tastes, this installment might be for you! If you love Golan Treveze or the version of Hari Seldon who inhabits the Foundation Prequels, you'll like Biron Ferrill better as this installment goes forward! If you think that there is a bit too much buckling and swashing in the first section, there is a bit of action where Biron overpowers a guard, tying him up with a pair of pantyhose. But once Gil and Artemisia help steal a space ship things settle down to storytelling and discussing galactic goings on as opposed to any actual going or actually doing anything story-inspiring. Plus, it's something that passes for a plot twist!

So, let's go! Help us bust the stars like dust with the vacuum of space!

d novel! Join us for The Stars, Like Dust—! In this episode, we sift through chapters one through eight.

The Stars, Like Dust is book #003 in the Asimov canon. That's a little misleading. Book #002 I, Robot is a fix-up; most of it had been written years before. This was the second time the Good Doctor sat down to write a book and he intended to write a Novel with a capital "N." He wasn't having a good time of it. Walter Bradbury, Asimov's editor, had liked Pebble in the Sky and wanted a follow-up but he also wanted an outline and a couple of sample chapters. Bradbury rejected the first two proposals. John Jenkins of AsimovReviews.net put it this way.

"...now that he was a Novelist, Asimov was thinking he needed to write like one and was getting carried away. Rather than his sticking to his usual sparse prose, he was getting distinctly florid, and he needed to tone things down."

That's what comes from trying to write a Novel with a capital "N" I suppose. To make matters worse, when Galaxy Science Fiction bought the right to serialize the novel Horace Gold insisted on a subplot that Asimov really didn't care for.

But now it was time to sit down and write, which is what our good friend Isaac does best. Join us to see how the book turned out! This reading coincides with the installment published in the January 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction under the title Tyrann.

We encounter the back cover of the Good Doctor's first actual book as we wrap up The Pebble in the Sky with chapters 14 through 22.

If you've been around for a while you probably remember our discussions of the "Great Man Theory of History" vs the "Bottom-Up" paradigm. In other words, do remarkable individuals with unique characteristics write history or is it driven by powerful historical forces that generate great leaders when needed? It's a false dichotomy, but a useful one. In the Foundation Universe, the bottom-up theory must dominate otherwise psychohistory could not work the way it does.

But Joseph Schwartz is just the right Jewish tailor with a special kind of trick memory who is accidentally thrust to an exact moment in Earth's future. Once there he is brought to the only scientist on Earth doing a particular type of brain research. He then survives a dangerous experiment that gives him an unlikely set of psychic powers which he uses to save the lives of nearly every human in the galaxy.

Put those numbers into your Prime Radiant and crunch them!

This probably delayed the creation of psychohistory by hundreds of years. "I just don't understand it, Hari, the math says everyone in the galaxy should be dead right now."

For additional content check out Of Pebbles and Pulps, exclusively at StarsEndPodcast.com.