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"one of our natural wonders and national resources." He was guest of honor and toastmaster at World Science Fiction Conventions. He won Hugos and Nebulas, was named a Grand Master by his fellow science-fiction writers, and, perhaps best of all, John Campbell told him, "You are one of the greatest science-fiction writers in the world."
    As a rational man, Asimov knew that the present must be accepted, and as a rational man, he knew that what he was was an excellent thing to be. So the world said, and so he agreed. That life of reason found its expression in his fiction as well as his non-fiction. How it developed and how it expressed itself can be found in the following pages.

2 The Foundations of Science Fiction
    The foundations of science fiction were constructed in the science-fiction magazines created by various entrepreneurs from the mid-1920s to 1950. Today the influence of those magazines has been diminished by alternative methods of publication: hardcover and paperback books, original anthologies, films and television, comic magazines, even comic strips, which seem to be making a comeback after the original Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon days.
    Even contemporary writers who are scornful of the magazines, of the Gernsback ghetto and the Campbell cabal, are writing fiction influenced by the concepts created in the magazines and by the conversations carried on by means of stories and letters and articles that led to a kind of consensus view of the future and the conventions by which it could be described. Reaction has developed, but reaction itself is a kind of tribute to the power of earlier visions.
    Science fiction was built on individual works as well: on E.E. "Doc" Smith's galaxy-spanning spaceships and John W. Campbell's mightiest machines, on Murray Leinster's first contacts with the unknown and Robert Heinlein's future history, on A.E. van Vogt's supermen and Isaac Asimov's robots. And on Asimov's Galactic Empire.
    The Foundation Trilogy is a basic work upon which a vast structure of stories has been built. Its assumptions provided a solid footing for a whole city of fictional constructions. The way in which it was created, then, and the way in which it came to prominence may be useful examples of the process by which science fiction was shaped in the magazines.
    The Trilogy, which actually consists of five novelettes and four novellas, has received many tributes to its importance. The 1966 World Science Fiction Convention awarded it a Hugo as "the greatest all-time science fiction series." Donald Wollheim, in his The Universe Makers, called it "the point of departure for the full cosmogony of science-fiction future history. Asimov attributed his success as a writer to it. It continues to be reprinted; it continues to sell well Asimov did not keep accurate track, but he checked up a few years ago and found that by 1978 it had sold more than two million copies. It may be the best-known science-fiction work of recent times, at least among those works defined as hard-core science fiction. And it eventually transformed Asimov, to his surprise, into a writer of bestsellers.
    On the other hand, critics have attacked the Trilogy for a variety of reasons. Professor Charles Elkins of Florida International University called it "seriously flawed," "stylistically . . . a disaster," its characters "undifferentiated and one-dimensional," and Asimov's ear for dialogue "simply atrocious." Its ideas, Elkins concluded, are vulgar, mechanized, debased . . . Marxism." Although not all the criticism is so negative, Elkins's comments are typical not only of Asimov's critics but of what literary critics commonly say about magazine science fiction as a body of literature.
    Asimov himself has described the Trilogy as "in the older tradition of the wide-spanning galactic romance." But, strangely, the series contains little action and almost no romance. The stories offer no maidens in need of rescue and no involvement of man and woman in an