Ugly Little Boy, The

Name: Ugly Little Boy, The
Rating: 3.769230769230769 (13 reviews)
Author: Isaac Asimov
ISBN: 9780553561227

by Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg

3.8

(13 ratings)

387 pages1958SpectraISBN 9780553561227

Audio bookScience Fiction Fantasy Classics Fiction RomanceRobotsGeneral

About this book

Isaac Asimov first published as short story in the September 1958 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction as "Lastborn", and reprinted in the 1959 collection Nine Tomorrows as "The Ugly Little Boy". Robert Silverberg later adapted it as a 1992 novel of the same title. ---------- **(Spoiler Alert)** The story deals with a Neanderthal child (Timmie) brought to the future by a somewhat callous research company (Stasis Inc.). Kept within an energy isolated field, to prevent catastrophic energy/temporal differential costs, nurse Edith Fellows is engaged to look after Timmie's basic welfare. At first repelled by the boys appearance, when the company decides to return Timmie to the past knowing his survival skills have been lost; Edith points out returning him would be a death sentence. Finally Edith enters the isolation field and deliberately triggers a breach thus returning to the past with Timmie as his mother.

Publication Details

Publisher: Spectra
Published: 1958
Pages: 387
ISBN: 9780553561227
Language: en

About Isaac Asimov

Asimov was born sometime between October 4, 1919 and January 2, 1920 in Petrovichi in Smolensk Oblast, RSFSR (now Russia), the son of a Jewish family of millers. Although his exact date of birth is uncertain, Asimov himself celebrated it on January 2. His family emigrated to Brooklyn, New York and opened a candy store when he was three years old. He taught himself to read at the age of five. He began reading the science fiction pulp magazines that his family's store carried. Around the age of eleven, he began to write his own stories, and by age nineteen, he was selling them to the science fiction magazines. He graduated from Columbia University in 1939. He married Gertrude Blugerman in 1942. During World War II he worked as a civilian at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station. After the war, he returned to Columbia University and earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1948. He then joined the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine until 1958, when he became a full-time writer. His first novel, [Pebble in the Sky](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL46402W), was published in 1950. He and his wife divorced in 1973, and he married Janet O. Jeppson the same year. He was a highly prolific writer, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 9,000 letters and postcards.