Half-Breed (short Story) - Themes

Themes

As with his earlier story "The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use", the theme of "Half-Breed" is the prejudice faced by minorities, something Asimov himself was familiar with due to his Jewish heritage. "I kept coming back to this theme very frequently," he wrote in The Early Asimov, "something not surprising in a Jew growing up during the Hitler era." In I. Asimov he wrote, "The undercurrent of genteel anti-Semitism was always there . . . people such as the Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin and the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh openly expressed anti-Semitic views." However, he was also aware that "prejudice was universal and that all groups who were not dominant, who were not actually at the top of the status chain, were potential victims."

This view put him at odds with Astounding editor John W. Campbell. Asimov noted in The Early Asimov that Campbell "seemed to me to accept the natural superiority of Americans over non-Americans, and he seemed automatically to assume the picture of an American as one who was of northwest European origin. I cannot say that Campbell was a racist in any evil sense of the term . . . . Nevertheless, he did seem to take for granted, somehow, the stereotype of the Nordic white as the true representative of Man the Explorer, Man the Darer, Man the Victor."

Asimov admitted that even by the standards of scientific knowledge in 1939, the possibility that Mars might have a native intelligent race was unlikely, and the possibility that Martians and humans would be interfertile was even more so. "I can only shake my head wearily," he writes. "I knew better in 1939; I really did. I just accepted science fictional clichés, that's all. Eventually, I stopped doing that." Asimov also noted that "Half-Breed" was "the first story in which I tried to introduce the romantic motif, however light. It had to be a failure. At the time of the writing of this story, I had still never had a date with a girl."