Pebble in The Sky - Plot Introduction

Plot Introduction

The book begins with a retired tailor from the mid-20th Century, who is accidentally pitched forward into the future. By then, Earth has become radioactive and is a low-status part of a vast Galactic Empire. There is both a mystery and a power-struggle, and a lot of debate and human choices. The originality of the S.F. work is the choice of a very ordinary man as the story's protagonist, rather than the more typical space opera hero.

This book takes place in the same universe as the Foundation series. Earth is part of the Empire of Trantor, later the setting for Hari Seldon's invention of psychohistory. Asimov returned to the radioactive-Earth theme in The Stars, Like Dust; The Currents of Space; and Foundation and Earth. He would explore it most fully in Robots and Empire.

Pebble in the Sky has been grouped along with The Stars, Like Dust and The Currents of Space as the so-called Galactic Empire series. However, these are only loosely connected, occurring between the era of the Spacers and the Foundation Series, but not otherwise overlapping each other in time, location, or theme.

In this work, unlike The End of Eternity, the time travel is one-way and uncontrolled. It might be an accidental use of the same technology — Asimov hints at a connection in Foundation's Edge, but never definitely settled the point.

One element of the novel of which Asimov was particularly fond was the inclusion of a scene of exposition conducted over the course of a game of chess between two of the characters. By recounting all the moves, Asimov reacted against the common tendency of novelistic portrayals of chess games to neglect the action on the board. The game that he chose to present was a victory by Grigory Levenfish (black) over Boris Verlinsky (white) in Moscow in 1924, one which gained the victor a brilliancy prize.