Plot summary
Louis Peyton is a master criminal who spent decades challenging the law, with the police having never managed to gather any direct evidence against him. One August, Albert Cornwell takes him to the Moon to retrieve a cache of extremely valuable "Singing Bells". The Bells are lunar rocks which, when struck by the correct stroker, make an incredibly beautiful sound. Not a dozen people on Earth own a flawless Bell, while the cache contains two dozen, and each can be sold for a hundred thousand dollars minimum (assuming 1955 prices, over a million each in 2023). Cornwell had obtained the map to the cache by killing their discoverer. Once the retrieval is complete, Peyton kills Cornwell, flies back to Earth and hides the Bells. The ship is programmed to lift off automatically and then explodes.
The policeman in charge of the investigation, Inspector Davenport, contacts Wendell Urth to help him prove that Peyton had been on the Moon. Davenport has been trying to pin Peyton down for years, but the man never leaves direct evidence. He has no alibi in the regular sense, but he doesn't need one, either. Every police record shows that Peyton spends each August totally isolated on his Colorado ranch behind a powerful force-field, even having jumped bail once for the purpose. His routine has been no different this year until he entered the estate, and that's where he has been arrested. As such, any court will have to assume Peyton spent his August as usual. However, as far as Davenport is concerned, only Peyton has both the impudence and the contacts for trying to sell smuggled Singing Bells. What he needs is to psycho-probe Peyton to get sufficient evidence for a conviction. However, since a person can only be psycho-probed once-in-a-lifetime, Davenport needs enough evidence to prove the guilt to begin with, if not to the court, then at least to his superiors.
Urth gives Peyton his own flawed, yet still valuable Singing Bell to examine. He then has Peyton throw it back to him. The toss falls short and the Bell is destroyed when it crashes to the floor. Urth has demonstrated that Peyton had been off-planet very recently, despite his claim to the contrary, and had not yet readjusted to Earth's gravity. The killer is taken away to be psycho-probed. Urth requests a perfect bell as his fee and compensation.
Isaac Asimov was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as popular science and other non-fiction.
Foundation and Earth is a science fiction novel by American writer Isaac Asimov, the fifth novel of the Foundation series and chronologically the last in the series. It was published in 1986, four years after the first sequel to the Foundation trilogy, which is titled Foundation's Edge.
The Foundation series is a science fiction book series written by American author Isaac Asimov. First published as a series of short stories and novellas in 1942–50, and subsequently in three collections in 1951–53, for nearly thirty years the series was a trilogy: Foundation (1951); Foundation and Empire (1952); and Second Foundation (1953). It won the one-time Hugo Award for "Best All-Time Series" in 1966. Asimov later added new volumes, with two sequels: Foundation's Edge (1982) and Foundation and Earth (1986), and two prequels: Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1993).
Nemesis is a science fiction novel by American writer Isaac Asimov. One of his later science fiction novels, it was published in 1989, three years before his death. The novel is loosely related to the future history of his Robot Series, Empire Series, and Foundation Series, into which Asimov attempted to integrate his science fiction output. This novel is connected to Asimov's other works by several ideas from earlier and later novels, including non-human intelligence, sentient astronomical bodies ("Hallucination"), and rotor engines.
This is a bibliography of the books written or edited by Isaac Asimov, arranged alphabetically. Asimov was a prolific author, and he engaged in many collaborations with other authors. This list may not yet be complete. The total number of books listed here is over 500. Asimov died in 1992 at age 72; a small number of his books were published posthumously.
"The Dying Night" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. The story first appeared in the July 1956 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and was reprinted in the collections Nine Tomorrows (1959), Asimov's Mysteries (1968), and The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973). "The Dying Night" is Asimov's third Wendell Urth story.
"Anniversary" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It was first published in the March 1959 issue of Amazing Stories and subsequently appeared in the collections Asimov's Mysteries (1968) and The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973).
David Starr, Space Ranger is the first novel in the Lucky Starr series, six juvenile science fiction novels by Isaac Asimov that originally appeared under the pseudonym Paul French. The novel was written between 10 June and 29 July 1951 and first published by Doubleday & Company in January 1952. Since 1971, reprints have included an introduction by Asimov explaining that advancing knowledge of conditions on Mars have rendered some of the novel's descriptions of that world inaccurate. The novel was originally intended to serve as the basis for a television series, a science-fictionalized version of The Lone Ranger, but the series was never made, in part because another series called Rocky Jones, Space Ranger was already in the planning stages.
Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter is the fifth novel in the Lucky Starr series, six juvenile science fiction novels by Isaac Asimov that originally appeared under the pseudonym Paul French. The novel was first published by Doubleday & Company in August 1957. It is the only novel by Asimov set in the Jovian system.
The Book of the New Sun is a four-volume science fantasy novel written by the American author Gene Wolfe. The work is in four parts with a fifth novel acting as a coda to the main story. It inaugurated the "Solar Cycle" that Wolfe continued by setting other works in the same universe.
Asimov's Mysteries, published in 1968, is a collection of 14 short stories by American writer Isaac Asimov, almost all of them science fiction mysteries. The stories were all originally published in magazines between 1954 and 1967, except for "Marooned off Vesta", Asimov's first published story, which first appeared in 1939.
The Urth of the New Sun is a 1987 science fiction novel by Gene Wolfe that serves as a coda to his four-volume Book of the New Sun series. Like Book of the New Sun, it is of the Dying Earth subgenre. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1988.
"The Dust of Death" is a science fiction/mystery short story by American writer Isaac Asimov, first published in the January 1957 issue of Venture Science Fiction Magazine and reprinted in the 1968 collection Asimov's Mysteries.
The Hollow Moon and the closely related Spaceship Moon are pseudoscientific hypotheses that propose that Earth's Moon is either wholly hollow or otherwise contains a substantial interior space. No scientific evidence exists to support the idea; seismic observations and other data collected since spacecraft began to orbit or land on the Moon indicate that it has a thin crust, extensive mantle and small, dense core, although overall it is much less dense than Earth.
The Best Mysteries of Isaac Asimov is a collection of mystery short stories by American author Isaac Asimov. It was first published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1986, and in paperback by the Fawcett Crest imprint of Ballantine Books in September 1987.
The Asimov Chronicles: Fifty Years of Isaac Asimov is a collection of forty eight short science fiction and mystery stories and two science essays by American writer Isaac Asimov, published by Dark Harvest in May 1989.
"The Ultimate Crime" is a short story by Isaac Asimov, dealing with a minor aspect of one of the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is the 24th of Asimov's Black Widowers mystery stories, and it appeared in his anthology More Tales of the Black Widowers, which collects the second dozen stories of the series. It was written specially for that book. It subsequently appeared again in Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space, an anthology of stories written by different authors and co-edited by Asimov, and Another Round at the Spaceport Bar.
In a writing career spanning 53 years (1939–1992), science fiction and popular science author Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) wrote and published 40 novels, 383 short stories, over 280 non-fiction books, and edited about 147 others.
The Key is a science fiction mystery novelette by American writer Isaac Asimov. It is one of the stories featuring the reclusive scientist Wendell Urth. It first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in October 1966, and was reprinted in the anthologies Asimov's Mysteries (1968) and The Best Mysteries of Isaac Asimov (1986).
Depending on the counting convention used, and including all titles, charts, and edited collections, there may be currently over 500 books in Isaac Asimov's bibliography—as well as his individual short stories, individual essays, and criticism. For his 100th, 200th, and 300th books, Asimov published Opus 100 (1969), Opus 200 (1979), and Opus 300 (1984), celebrating his writing.
