Asri-unix.525 net.space utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!hpvax!sri-unix!csin!cjh@CCA-UNIX Fri Jan 15 10:21:31 1982 Thiotimoline was indeed invented by Isaac Asimov. As he says in IN MEMORY YET GREEN (vol. 1 of autobiography) he had been selling SF since very early in college and, a decade later, was worried that he wouldn't be able to summon the turgid prose considered appropriate for a doctoral thesis in chemistry after developing an excellent, readable style for the SF magazines. (A lot of his prose seems bland or flat today but his early work was certainly much better as writing than much of what was published then.) He accordingly wrote this fake scientific paper, "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline", which Campbell published in a tall tales section of ASF. Another paper described side effects of thiotimoline, and "Thiotimoline to the Stars", written for the Campbell memorial anthology, proposed its use in space travel. (If you can't have FTL, get up to relativistic speeds and use t- to pull your ship back so that internal and external times appear to match.) Asimov also claims that after he had been grilled on general chemistry and the contents of his thesis one of the professors asked, "And now, \\Mr.// Asimov, what can you tell us about the properties of thiotimoline?" at which point A had to be carried from the room. Incidentally, ASF has had a number of strange things show up in it, since Campbell was given to a wide range of enthusiasms. (This is far from uncommon in geniuses; Edison, for instance, was rare in being able to make practical objects out of most of his ideas, and the later interests of, for instance, Newton, can be embarassing to the historian of science.) But I don't think it is legitimate to speak of "hoaxes" in ASF, save in the humorous reading of the word (e.g., thiotimoline, Kelvin Throop); so far as a large number of people have been able to discover, it has never succumbed to the sort of behavior common in, for instance, flying saucer magazines. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.