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:
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
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“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
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—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)