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Originally Posted by bill_mchale
I think we are going to have to agree to disagree here. That being said, I am going to make my argument  .
1. The first three published novels in the Foundation Series were in fact not novels at all, but collections of short fiction that had originally appeared in pulps (With an exception of the first story which was written specifically to start Foundation).
2. If we look at Asimov's science fiction output, and discount fix-up novels like the original Foundation Trilogy and his juvenile novels, he actually wrote most of his science fiction novels in the last decade of his life; long after his reputation as a Science Fiction Author had been assured. |
I think you're forgetting _Pebble In the Sky_ (1950), _The Stars Like Dust_ (1951) and _The Currents of Space_ (1952), _The End of Eternity (1955), and _Double Planet_ (1960). I wouldn't discount the "Lucky Starr, Space Ranger" juveniles, either, though he did write those as "Paul French"
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3. Prior to 1982, there were more collections of Asimov's short fiction than there Asimov novels published. In addition, some of these stories, including the ones you mentioned as well as others are some of the best known stores in Science Fiction. His robot short stories, especially those collected in I Robot not only redefined how SF looked at robots but also inspired many of the pioneers of real industrial robots.
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Granted, and I'll concede the point. Isaac's reputation was made on short stories.
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How about Tom Godwin, H. Beam Piper, Cordwainer Smith, A. E. van Vogt, Murray Leinster, C. M. Kornbluth? And lets not forget Ray Bradbury, yes he has published some novels, but he has published far more short fiction, and at least two of his novels (The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine) are essentially collections of short fiction.
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Granted on Bradbury. Less so on the rest.
Piper is known as much for novels as for shorter work, I think, with the classic being _Little Fuzzy_, which was not a fixup of shorter works the way _Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen_ was. Godwin was known for one short story _ "The Cold Equations_" (which has emotional power but doesn't hold up under close reading), but probably wrote more long stuff, like _Prison Planet_. A.E. Van Vogt wrote shorter stuff, but is known for novels, with the classic being _Slan_. Smith wrote a mixture, though most of the Instrumentality of Mankind works were shorter pieces. Kornbluth alone wrote primarily short fiction (with the exception of _Not This August_), but worked in longer forms in collaboration with Fred Pohl and Judith Merrill (the latter written as "Cyril Judd").
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I think our perspective might also be a bit skewed because the emphasis in literature in the past 20 years has skewed so strongly towards novels and series. Even in Science Fiction, where short fiction remains relatively healthy, it seems that many people read novels to the exclusion of short fiction. As a result we forget that short fiction all but dominated the science fiction market prior to the 1950s.
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Prior to the 1950's, there really wasn't a book market for SF. It was largely the magazines, so yes, that too will skew perspective.
(And in the various fixups, a probably unanswerable question is whether many of them were written as shorts and then assembled into a novel, or written as a novel with stand alone pieces lifted out of them because there was an additional paying market for them in the magazines as shorter works. I suspect more the former than the latter, but can't prove it either way offhand.)
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Dennis