Half-Breed (short Story) - Story Background

Story Background

Half-Breed is set several centuries in the future: at one point, Scanlon notes with relief that it has been two centuries since a war was last fought on Earth, so there is no risk of his newly-invented atomic power source being used as a weapon.

The presence of the Tweenies on Earth is unexplained by Asimov. Max, who is nineteen when Scanlon saves and adopts him, is the oldest Tweenie in the story, which suggests that the existence of the Tweenies is a recent phenomenon. This in turn implies that interplanetary travel is also a recent phenomenon, an implication supported by Scanlon's description of pre-atomic trips to Mars and Venus as "hazardous gambles". Another implication of the Tweenies' presence on Earth is that the native Martians will not allow them to remain on Mars. Those Tweenies who are on Earth were presumably brought there as infants by human spacemen returning from Mars. Their human parents (probably the crew of Earth ships who have traveled to Mars) have abandoned them, and they have become wards of the state, being raised in state-run orphanages.

When Scanlon goes searching for a female Tweenie companion for Max, he only finds one of a suitable age, which implies that the number of Tweenies on Earth at that time is small. Fifty years later, Tweenietown has a population of 1,154, some of which is undoubtedly due to natural increase by the original Tweenie population, and some of which is equally undoubtedly due to the arrival of more orphaned Tweenies from Mars (since Scanlon and Max's discovery of atomic power makes interplanetary travel more common).

In the fifty-one years that pass in the course of the story, the situation for the Tweenies remains unchanged on Earth. The Tweenies lack, as Scanlon notes, political, legal, economic, and social equality with humans (and, for that matter, with native Martians). Human (and Martian) hostility towards the Tweenies seems to be permanently ingrained.