The Stars, Like Dust - Comments

Comments

Asimov noted in his autobiography that the genesis of the Constitution subplot lay with H. L. Gold, editor of Galaxy magazine. Asimov felt that Gold's judgment was at fault by attributing too much power to the Constitution as a document. Asimov later considered the premise highly improbable, and became annoyed at Gold for having persuaded him to insert the subplot into the novel. Whatever Asimov's opinion of the novel, he never actually withdrew it from publication.

On its initial book publication, reviewer Groff Conklin termed the novel "a first-rate piece of imaginative story-telling." In Astounding Science Fiction, Villiers Gerson declared the novel successful, despite its "unidimensional" characters, due to "Asimov's skill as a story-teller of suspense." The New York Times found the novel "a rousing adventure story of the remote future."

Reviewer Jane Fowler noted that "Making the re-discovery of the United States Constitution into the climax of the plot implies that the space civilization depicted is going to take up this Constitution as a model for building a new political structure, that the "space feudalism" which dominates the political system depicted in the book will be transformed into some kind of a federal, representative democracy. That could have worked fine if this was a stand-alone novel. As part of a series, it does not work because we know that galactic civilization is not going to develop in this way. Trantor will expand and expand, until the entire galaxy is included in its empire. Trantor and its empire have many points in their favor, but it is not a democratic federation. So, the re-discovery of the US Constitution led nowhere, it did not shape a new political reality, and in the end probably ended up right back in a collection of old documents. Of course, the fact is that when Asimov wrote this he probably did not yet fully realize that this was going to be an integral part of a comprehensive long series"