Origins
This story was written for the famous "time travel" issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The issue was prompted by a letter from a reader commenting on the stories in an issue, referring to the stories by author and title, and offering his respective praise and derision for those works. The magazine commonly received these kinds of letters; however, in this case, the reader described an issue whose cover date was more than a year away. Editor John W. Campbell printed the letter, then set about making the predictions come true by arranging with the authors mentioned to write and submit stories with the given titles. Gulf, by Heinlein, was one of the stories involved.
Heinlein has written that he had a different idea for the story originally, but decided that it was too large for a novella and could not be written in the time he had available. The idea later became one of the inspirations for his novel Stranger in a Strange Land. For the magazine, he decided that the gulf between man and superman would provide an adequate basis for the title.
Read more about this topic: Gulf (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?””
—Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)