The Up-To-Date Sorcerer

Infobox short story |
name = The Up-To-date Sorcerer
title_orig = The Up-To-Date Sorcerer
translator =
author = Isaac Asimov
country = United States
language = English
series =
genre = science fiction short story
published_in = "Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction"
publisher = Mercury Press
media_type = Print (Magazine)
pub_date = July 1958
english_pub_date =
preceded_by =
followed_by = "The Up-To-Date Sorcerer" is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. It was first published in the July 1958 issue of "Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction" and reprinted in the 1969 collection "Nightfall and Other Stories".

Plot summary

The story, requested and encouraged by editor Anthony Boucher, is a deliberate attempt by the author to write a funny story and incorporates his love of the complex yet logical plots found in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

The plot, a series of puns on the opera "The Sorcerer", centres on Professor Wellington Johns, an endocrinologist, and his students, Alice Sanger and Alexander Dexter. Johns experiments with a love-philtre (which he terms his amatogenic cortical principle), that causes those who take it to fall helplessly in love with the first person they see. But when the couples marry, the philtre ceases to have any effect and the couples are free to have the marriage annulled so that they can marry their true loves.

tory notes

Quotes from Gilbert and Sullivan operas occur frequently in Asimov's stories; also in some of his verses explaining how he thinks up new plots for his stories.