Astounding Science Fiction (British Edition)

About this issue

DEAD HAND by Isaac Asimov is a novelette set four centuries into the declining Galactic Empire. General Bel Riose, a young military commander positioned on the frontier world Siwenna, visits the elderly scholar Ducem Barr seeking knowledge of mysterious "magicians" appearing from the Periphery. Riose hopes to mount a military campaign against them. Barr reveals that his father encountered one such magician decades earlier—a merchant from the Galaxy's edge bearing an impossibly miniaturized force-shield generator, a device no Imperial technology could have produced. Barr shows Riose the abandoned generator itself, now fused and inert. Barr also identifies the origin of these visitors to a legendary psycho-historian named Hari Seldon, once Siwenna's greatest scientist. The story explores the tension between Riose's military ambitions and Barr's guardianship of forbidden knowledge. The issue includes stories "Correspondence Course" by Raymond F. Jones, "Vocation" by George O. Smith, and "Brains for Bricks" by Malcolm Jameson.