The original Foundation books are also a string of linked episodes, whereas this is a complete story involving a single group of characters.

Pebble in the Sky was originally written in the summer of 1947 under the title "Grow Old with Me" for Startling Stories, whose editor Sam Merwin, Jr. had approached Asimov to write a forty thousand word short novel for the magazine.

In 1949, Doubleday editor Walter I. Bradbury accepted the story on the suggestion of Frederik Pohl, on the condition it was expanded to seventy thousand words and the title changed to something more science fiction oriented, and it was published in January 1950 as Pebble in the Sky.

[2] In Before the Golden Age, Asimov wrote that Pebble in the Sky was influenced by the short story "Proxima Centauri" by Murray Leinster.

Pebble in the Sky has been grouped along with The Stars, Like Dust and The Currents of Space as the so-called Galactic Empire series.

By recounting all the moves, Asimov reacted against the common tendency of novelistic portrayals of chess games to neglect the action on the board.

The game that he chose to present was a victory by Grigory Levenfish (black) over Boris Verlinsky (white) in Moscow in 1924, one which gained the victor a brilliancy-prize.

While walking down the street in Chicago, Joseph Schwartz, a retired tailor, is the unwitting victim of a nearby nuclear laboratory accident, by means of which he is instantaneously transported tens of thousands of years into the future (50,000 years, by one character's estimate, a figure later retconned by future Asimov works as a "mistake").

The procedure, which has killed several subjects, works in his case, and he finds that he can quickly learn to speak the current lingua franca.

They have created a new, deadly supervirus that they plan to use to kill or subjugate the rest of the Empire, and to avenge themselves for the way their planet has been treated by the galaxy at large.

Schwartz uses his mental abilities to provoke a pilot from the Imperial garrison into bombing the site where the arsenal of the super-virus exists.

[3] L. Sprague de Camp, however, recommended the novel highly, praising it as "excellent; one of the few really mature and professional jobs available in book form [in 1950].

Foundation and Earth, in its concluding scene, establishes that Daneel survives into the Interregnum period, after the First Galactic Empire collapses.

Janov Pelorat stated that, if he understood the legends of Alpha correctly, the start of the restoration attempt was right before a period of much larger problems for the Empire.

Daneel explains that he had a role in attempting the restoration of Earth's soil and also settling humans at "Alpha", but achieved less than he had wanted.