It seems that this is spring cleaning week. Here’s another piece that I wrote some time ago and simply never got around to publishing. 

Isaac Asimov’s introduction to “Segregationist”:

In the spring of 1967, I received an interesting request. It seems there is a periodical called Abbot tempo, supported by Abbott Laboratories, a respected pharmaceutical firm. It is a slick-paper, impressively designed job, with excellent articles on various medical and near-medical subjects. It is printed in the Netherlands and is distributed free of charge to physicians in Great Britain and on the Continent. It is not distributed in the United States.

The editor of Abbottempo wrote to ask me to write a 2000-word science fiction story on a subject of medical interest that physicians would find at once interesting, amusing, and thought-provoking.

I was just as swamped with work at that moment as I am at all other moments, so I sighed and put a piece of letter paper in the typewriter, intending to write out a polite refusal.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, it takes time to pick up letter paper and a yellow second sheet, put a piece of carbon paper between, and roll the sandwich into the typewriter. It takes additional time to center the paper properly, type the date, address, and salutation.

What with all that time, I happened to think up a story I couldn’t resist, so when I actually got past the “Dear Sir,” I found myself typing a polite acceptance.

I wrote “Segregationist” in April 1967, on a theme that was completely and entirely science-fictional. It appeared in December 1967, just in time to be slightly behind the headlines in some respects.

The nicest result of the publication of the story, by the way, was that Abbottempo published it in each of their eight editions. They sent me a boxed collection of the set in 1) English, 2) French, 3) Spanish, 4) German, 5) Italian, 6) Japanese, 7) Greek, and 8) Turkish. I had never before had anything I had written translated into either Greek or Turkish, and the set remains one of the more interesting oddities of my personal library of Asimoviana.

First appearance–Abbottempo, Book 4, 1967. Copyright, 1968, by Isaac Asimov. 

The story, entitled “Segregationist”, was reprinted in the October 1968 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and here it is in the archives. It’s very short and can be read in about five minutes or so.