Asri-unix.525
net.space
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!hpvax!sri-unix!csin!cjh@CCA-UNIX
Fri Jan 15 10:21:31 1982
Thiotimoline
was indeed invented by Isaac Asimov. As he says in IN MEMORY YET GREEN
(vol. 1 of autobiography) he had been selling SF since very early in
college and, a decade later, was worried that he wouldn't be able to
summon the turgid prose considered appropriate for a doctoral thesis in
chemistry after developing an excellent, readable style for the SF
magazines. (A lot of his prose seems bland or flat today but his early
work was certainly much better as writing than much of what was published
then.) He accordingly wrote this fake scientific paper, "The Endochronic
Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline", which Campbell published in
a tall tales section of ASF. Another paper described side effects of
thiotimoline, and "Thiotimoline to the Stars", written for the Campbell
memorial anthology, proposed its use in space travel. (If you can't
have FTL, get up to relativistic speeds and use t- to pull your ship
back so that internal and external times appear to match.)
Asimov also claims that after he had been grilled on general chemistry
and the contents of his thesis one of the professors asked, "And now,
\\Mr.// Asimov, what can you tell us about the properties of thiotimoline?"
at which point A had to be carried from the room.
Incidentally, ASF has had a number of strange things show up in it, since
Campbell was given to a wide range of enthusiasms. (This is far from
uncommon in geniuses; Edison, for instance, was rare in being able to make
practical objects out of most of his ideas, and the later interests of,
for instance, Newton, can be embarassing to the historian of science.)
But I don't think it is legitimate to speak of "hoaxes" in ASF, save in
the humorous reading of the word (e.g., thiotimoline, Kelvin Throop);
so far as a large number of people have been able to discover, it has
never succumbed to the sort of behavior common in, for instance, flying
saucer magazines.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen <
[email protected]>
of
http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/
This Usenet Oldnews Archive
article may be copied and distributed freely, provided:
1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles.
2. The following notice remains appended to each copy:
The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996
Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.
