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My first reading of this well-written, pithy short story was as a kid in the early 60s. It had been published in 1957 in one of the SF pulp magazines of that day, and a friend had passed that back issue on to me. (Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ uses that magazine's cover as its image for the story --but the cover art was for a completely different selection, so has absolutely nothing to do with this one!) As with many of my reads in those years, I forgot the author/title information; but the story itself stayed with me very well, a testament to the quality of the writing. Recently, I downloaded a different story from the same era as a free e-story (and hope to review it as well soon), based on a review by a Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friend, in the belief that it might be this one. Instead, it proved to be a later thin and inferior rip-off of this one; but by then my interest in Memory Lane was piqued enough to search seriously for the real one. Here's the link where it can be read online for free: . Last night, I read it for the second time, now from an adult's perspective, and appreciated it even more.

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), of course, was one of the leading luminaries of American SF's "Golden Age," a friend and protege' of legendary pulp editor John W. Campbell Jr., whose long career was loaded with the genre's honors. Despite my long-standing interest in SF, though, my own tastes lie mostly outside the technophilic optimism and secular humanism of the genre's "hard" school that dominated the ghetto of magazine-based fandom in Asimov's youth (he started writing while still quite young) and shaped his style and vision. His acclaimed Foundation trilogy never interested me, and I couldn't get into his robot fiction; so what I've read of his corpus is a handful of short stories (and I find those a mixed bag). But this one is, IMO, the best work I've read from his pen, and one of the 20th century's master works of speculative fiction. Like much SF written in the late 40s and the 50s-60s, it's strongly influenced by the fear of possible nuclear war, which occupied the minds, not only of the literary community, but of many people in the general population (me included, at that age). Here, though, he takes that theme and writes a serious tale that grapples with ideas, not an arid tract.

Our primary setting is Earth's moon, about 15 years after World War II, where protagonist Devi-en heads the Hurrian colony. An uncritical evolutionist as always, Asimov here imagines that our galaxy has developed life on many planets, and evolution has always culminated in intelligent primates --almost always large, tailless, omnivorous primates with strong competitive instincts. Normally, once they develop nuclear technology, they proceed to largely destroy themselves and their world in a nuclear war. Only Hurria produced a dominant race of shorter, tailed and vegetarian primates whose dominant social instinct was cooperation. Never having had a nuclear war, they survived to develop space travel. For a very long time, they've waited for the galaxy's various other primate species to have their nuclear war, then moved in to rehabilitate and colonize the planet, dominate the survivors and collect tribute. But on Earth's moon, they've been waiting an unprecedented 15 years. Now, an Archadministrator has been sent to investigate the question of why the Earthlings aren't getting with the program.

In keeping with the hard SF tradition, Asimov doesn't depict anything here that's scientifically impossible (except for the basic implication of faster-than-light interplanetary travel, which was such an ingrained staple trope in the genre that even hard Sf purists wink at it). But his focus isn't on presenting a science lecture or extrapolating, from present knowledge, speculations on what technology might plausibly do in the future. Rather, his interest is social and moral/philosophical (as has been the interest of the best writers since the dawn of literature). He's primarily telling a meaningful, plotted story with high stakes (the fate of a world, and perhaps the galaxy), about characters you can relate to --even if they mostly happen to be three feet tall and furry, with tails. His Hurrians (they call themselves Humans) are intelligently and coherently drawn in a realistic way, and though their psychology is alien to ours, the author brings it to life and makes it totally understandable. That's a significant achievement of world-building in the scope of a short story; and this is one of the more thought-provoking works of fiction (of any length) that I've ever read.