Sucker Bait

"Sucker Bait"
Author	Isaac Asimov
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	Troas
Genre(s)	Science fiction short story
Published in	Astounding Science Fiction
Publication type	Periodical
Publisher	Street & Smith
Media type	Print (Magazine)
Publication date	February/March 1954
Followed by	"Question and Answer"

Sucker Bait is a science fiction novella by Isaac Asimov. It was first serialized in the February and March 1954 issues of Astounding Science Fiction, and reprinted in the 1955 collection The Martian Way and Other Stories. It has also been adapted as an episode of the BBC anthology television series Out of the Unknown.

Troas

Asimov was approached in 1953 by Twayne Press editor Fletcher Pratt with a story proposal: a scientist would create a world, and then he, Poul Anderson and Virginia Kidd (Anderson states that the third writer was Kidd's then-husband, James Blish) would write novellas set in that world.^[1] The three novellas would then be published as a book, together with an essay by the scientist who created the scenario. This formula, which Pratt called a Twayne Triplet, had already resulted in the 1952 book The Petrified Planet.

The scenario created was that of a binary star system in the Messier 13 globular cluster with an Earthlike planet called Troas (or more informally, Junior) located at one of the system's Lagrangian points. An earlier expedition to Troas had suffered some mysterious disaster, and a second expedition was being mounted to determine if the planet was suitable for colonization, and to find out what happened to the first expedition.

Asimov finished his story, and Anderson finished a story called "Question and Answer", but Kidd (or Blish) never completed the third story, and the proposed book never saw print. Asimov, anticipating just such an eventuality, confirmed that he held first serial rights on the story, and sold "Sucker Bait" to Astounding (where it appeared a few months before "Question and Answer").

Plot summary

The story concerns the starship George G. Grundy, or Triple G., which has been chartered by the Confederacy of Worlds to investigate Junior. The only nonscientist among the Triple G.'s passengers is 20-year-old Mark Annuncio of the Mnemonic Service, who has been trained from the age of five to memorize and correlate vast amounts of information.

Over a century earlier, an attempt to colonize Junior had failed; after nearly two years on the planet, all 1,337 colonists had died for reasons unknown. The Triple G.'s scientists and Annuncio have to find out what killed them. For the first two weeks after landing, everyone remains aboard while the scientists take readings. After Rodriguez, the expedition's microbiologist, declares the local life forms noninfectious, a handful of scientists, plus Annuncio, travel to the original colony site.

Relations between the scientists and Annuncio deteriorate rapidly. Mnemonics are loners by nature, and their training makes them even more so. The scientists, on the other hand, as specialists, tend to be contemptuous of a professional generalist like Annuncio. When Annuncio asks Rodriguez to explain how he came to a conclusion, the microbiologist regards the request as an affront to his professional reputation, and refuses to answer. The other scientists manage to offend Annuncio in various ways.

When Annuncio finally realizes that the abnormally high concentration of beryllium in Junior's crust was what killed the colonists, and that they all have to leave immediately, he does not trust the scientists to deal with it. He returns to the ship and persuades the crew to mutiny and take the ship off the planet. The captain is barely able to convince the crew to stop at the colony site to pick up the scientists. When Annuncio is put on trial for fomenting the mutiny, he explains his actions, is acquitted, and the ship returns to Earth to seek treatment.

Reception

Anthony Boucher praised the novella, commending its balance of science and fiction "worthy of that Golden Age in which Asimov began his career."^[2]

Themes

Like other stories by Asimov such as The Dead Past and Profession, the theme of Sucker Bait is the peril of scientific overspecialization. Only Annuncio, the professional generalist, can make the connections between seemingly unrelated facts that solves the mystery of the original colonists' deaths and saves the crew and passengers of the Triple G. from sharing their fate. Asimov would soon begin to practice what he preached, making himself into a professional generalist by writing popular science books on a number of different fields, as well as The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science, a general overview of science as a whole.

Story notes

• Although Junior's two primaries are named Lagrange I and II in the story, the proper astronomical nomenclature would be Lagrange A and B.
• "Sucker Bait" mentions several fictional planets, including some from other stories: Troas (Junior), Coralemon, Aurora, Sarmatia, Coma Minor, Hesperus, Pretoria, Altmark and Lepta.
• Some "80,000 worlds" are mentioned as having been colonized by that point in time, and it is perhaps an interesting coincidence that the Spacer world of Aurora — completely unconnected to the Foundation universe at the time Asimov wrote the story — is mentioned. This points to Sucker Bait taking place during a period in which Aurora itself was still populated and known to the galaxy at large, and some as-yet-unrevealed time prior to the Mycogenian relocation to Trantor.
• The story was confirmed by Asimov in 1955 to have been set in his Foundation universe, although some slight inconsistencies exist with the political status and physical condition of Earth by the timeframe of the tale — no mention is made of Earth's ever-increasing radioactivity (though this was retconned to be a very, very gradual process, and not the result of an atomic war circa the 10th millennium), and Earth still appears to be the center of the human race in general. This, however, was an early variant of the timeline, inconsistent with the Robot stories.
• This is the longest of Isaac Asimov's novellas.
• Mark Annuncio's memory/mental abilities and behavior is similar to that displayed by some people with Autism Spectrum Disorder, particularly Asperger Syndrome.
• At one point, a scientist states that a computer cannot do what the Mnemonic Service does, since even if there is a computer that knows all the required data, no one will know to ask the right question. A similar theme is present in Jokester, which features one of the few people in the world (so called Grand Masters) who are capable of finding the right questions to ask the all-knowing Multivac.
• The cover for the issue of ASTOUNDING wherein this appeared is notable for a chemistry-based wordplay. That cover shows a group of people gathered before an emigration-promotion poster reading "Be on Troas." Though this is apparently an invitation to emigrate, it is also a give-away of the story's solution: "Be" is the chemical symbol for beryllium.

Footnotes

1. ^ Anderson, Poul, Question and Answer (Ace Books, 1978), Introduction. (ISBN 0-441-69770-4)
2. ^ "Recommended Reading," F&SF, September 1955, p.92.

External links

• Sucker Bait publication history at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database