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Pebble in the Sky is a 1950 novel by Isaac Asimov, the first of the three Empire novels; it was followed by The Stars, Like Dust (1951), and The Currents of Space (1952). Though more than half a century old, the novel deals with some themes that are still relevant today—biological warfare; the mutual hate, suspicion, and contempt that can arise between peoples with unequal power; the fanaticism of cultural pride under siege; and the buried prejudices in even the most open-minded people.
Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.
Plot
Joseph Schwartz is a retired tailor living in contemporary America. While walking along a Chicago street one day, he is suddenly transported to another time and place by a nearby nuclear experiment gone awry. In fact, Schwartz has been transported to an Earth of the distant future, when humanity has settled the galaxy, and the capital of the galactic empire is already situated at Trantor. He finds a nearby house and tries to ask for help, but the people speak a language unknown to him. The inhabitants take him to a nearby scientist named Shekt, who has been conducting brain enhancement experiments using a device called a synapsifier. Shekt uses this device on Schwartz, and soon Schwartz’s mental capacity increases dramatically, encompassing even ESP and mind control.
Meanwhile, a prominent archaeologist named Arvardan has arrived on Earth to investigate his radical and unpopular theory that Earth is the original planet of the human race. Most scholars believe that humans evolved independently on millions of different worlds, and then intermarriage brought the genome together into a unified whole. Arvardan believes, however, that since Earth is radioactive and inhabited, that the radioactivity must have occurred artificially, after man evolved. Arvardan visits the scientist Shekt, and falls in love with Shekt’s daughter, Pola, even though he subconsciously considers her, as an Earth woman, beneath him.
Shekt tells Arvardan that through his experiments he has uncovered a dangerous plot. Imperial officials stationed on Earth feel contempt for the locals, and many of the locals resent their treatment in Imperial hands. Shekt has learned that the Society of Ancients, an ultra-nationalistic group on Earth, has hatched a plot to create a virus that would wipe out the populations of every planet in the empire, and only they would have the antidote. Shekt, Arvardan, and Joseph Schwartz all get swept up in the effort to uncover and foil this plot before it is too late.
Related Books
This is the first of the three Empire novels: the other two are The Stars, Like Dust (1951) and The Currents of Space (1952).
The reference to the planet Trantor as the capital of the galactic empire connects this book to the Foundation stories. Characters in Foundation, which takes place thousands of years after this book, also express theories on human origins similar to the theories described by Arvardan.
It seems likely that when Asimov wrote this book in 1950, he was thinking that the radiation on Earth had been caused by a long-forgotten nuclear war. For whatever reason, he later changed his mind, and in Robots and Empire (1985), Asimov offers up a different explanation for how the Earth came to be radioactive. That book also connects Pebble in the Sky to the robot-mystery novels: The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, and The Robots of Dawn.
The author published an earlier draft of Pebble in the Sky in The Alternate Asimovs (1986).
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