"Asimov, Isaac - Foundation 00 - Introduction" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asimov Isaac)

the January 1948 issue. By this time, though, I had grown tired of the
Foundation stories so I tried to end them by setting up, and solving, the
mystery of the location of the Second Foundation. Campbell would have none
of that, however. He forced me to change the ending, and made me promise I
would do one more Foundation story.

Well, Campbell was the kind of editor who could not be denied, so I wrote
one more Foundation story, vowing to myself that it would be the last. I
called it "ЦAnd Now You Don't," and it appeared as a three-part serial in
the November 1949, December 1949, and January 1950 issues of Astounding.

By then, I was on the biochemistry faculty of Boston University School of
Medicine, my first book had just been published, and I was determined to
move on to new things. I had spent eight years on the Foundation, written
nine stories with a total of about 220,000 words. My total earnings for the
series came to $3,641 and that seemed enough. The Foundation was over and
done with, as far as I was concerned.

In 1950, however, hardcover science fiction was just coming into existence.
I had no objection to earning a little more money by having the Foundation
series reprinted in book form. I offered the series to Doubleday (which had
already published a science-fiction novel by me, and which had contracted
for another) and to Little-Brown, but both rejected it. In that year,
though, a small publishing firm, Gnome Press, was beginning to be active,
and it was prepared to do the Foundation series as three books.

The publisher of Gnome felt, however, that the series began too abruptly.
He persuaded me to write a small Foundation story, one that would serve as
an introductory section to the first book (so that the first part of the
Foundation series was the last written).

In 1951, the Gnome Press edition of Foundation was published, containing
the introduction and the first four stories of the series. In 1952,
Foundation and Empire appeared, with the fifth and sixth stories; and in
1953, Second Foundation appeared, with the seventh and eighth stories. The
three books together came to be called The Foundation Trilogy.

The mere fact of the existence of the Trilogy pleased me, but Gnome Press
did not have the financial clout or the publishing knowhow to get the books
distributed properly, so that few copies were sold and fewer still paid me
royalties. (Nowadays, copies of first editions of those Gnome Press books
sell at $50 a copy and upЦbut I still get no royalties from them.)

Ace Books did put out paperback editions of Foundation and of Foundation
and Empire, but they changed the titles, and used cut versions. Any money
that was involved was paid to Gnome Press and I didn't see much of that. In
the first decade of the existence of The Foundation Trilogy it may have
earned something like $1500 total.

And yet there was some foreign interest. In early 1961, Timothy Seldes, who