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

was then my editor at Doubleday, told me that Doubleday had received a
request for the Portuguese rights for the Foundation series and, since they
weren't Doubleday books, he was passing them on to me. I sighed and said,
"The heck with it, Tim. I don't get royalties on those books."

Seldes was horrified, and instantly set about getting the books away from
Gnome Press so that Doubleday could publish them instead. He paid no
attention to my loudly expressed fears that Doubleday "would lose its shirt
on them." In August 1961 an agreement was reached and the Foundation books
became Doubleday property. What's more, Avon Books, which had published a
paperback version of Second Foundation, set about obtaining the rights to
all three from Doubleday, and put out nice editions.

From that moment on, the Foundation books took off and began to earn
increasing royalties. They have sold well and steadily, both in hardcover
and softcover, for two decades so far. Increasingly, the letters I received
from the readers spoke of them in high praise. They received more attention
than all my other books put together.

Doubleday also published an omnibus volume, The Foundation Trilogy, for its
Science Fiction Book Club. That omnibus volume has been continuously
featured by the Book Club for over twenty years.

Matters reached a climax in 1966. The fans organizing the World Science
Fiction Convention for that year (to be held in Cleveland) decided to award
a Hugo for the best all-time series, where the series, to qualify, had to
consist of at least three connected novels. It was the first time such a
category had been set up, nor has it been repeated since. The Foundation
series was nominated, and I felt that was going to have to be glory enough
for me, since I was sure that Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" would win.

It didn't. The Foundation series won, and the Hugo I received for it has
been sitting on my bookcase in the livingroom ever since.

In among all this litany of success, both in money and in fame, there was
one annoying side-effect. Readers couldn't help but notice that the books
of the Foundation series covered only three hundred-plus years of the
thousand-year hiatus between Empires. That meant the Foundation series
"wasn't finished." I got innumerable letters from readers who asked me to
finish it, from others who demanded I finish it, and still others who
threatened dire vengeance if I didn't finish it. Worse yet, various editors
at Doubleday over the years have pointed out that it might be wise to
finish it.

It was flattering, of course, but irritating as well. Years had passed,
then decades. Back in the 1940s, I had been in a Foundation-writing mood.
Now I wasn't. Starting in the late 1950s, I had been in a more and more
nonfiction-writing mood.

That didn't mean I was writing no fiction at all. In the 1960s and 1970s,