One moment Joseph Schwartz is a happily retired tailor in Chicago, 1949. The next he's a helpless stranger on Earth during the heyday of the first Galactic Empire. Earth, as he soon learns, is a backwater, just a pebble in the sky, despised by all the other 200 million planets of the Empire because its people dare to claim it's the original home of man. And Earth is poor, with great areas of radioactivity ruining much of its soil—so poor that everyone is sentenced to death at the age of sixty. Joseph Schwartz is sixty-two.

Isaac Asimov was born in 1920 in the Soviet Union. His family came to the United States in 1923. He earned his PhD in Chemistry in 1948, and in 1958 he became a full-time writer. His writings include: In Memory Yet Green, I. Asimov: A Memoir, Yours, Isaac Asimov, and It’s Been a Good Life, as well as three Opus books. He died in 1992.