Half-Breed (short story)
"Half-Breed" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It was first published in the February 1940 issue of Astonishing Stories and reprinted in the 1972 collection The Early Asimov. It was the fifteenth story written by Asimov, and the fourth to be published. At 9000 words, it was his longest published story to date.
"Half-Breed" was written in June 1939, and submitted to Amazing Stories and Astounding Science Fiction before being accepted by Frederik Pohl in October for his new magazine Astonishing Stories.
Asimov wrote a sequel to the story, titled "Half-Breeds on Venus".
Plot summary
Dr. Jefferson Scanlon, a struggling scientist, is trying, and failing, to develop a cheap and reliable method of generating atomic power. While he is taking a walk to think over his work, he rescues a nineteen-year-old orphan "Tweenie", the off-spring of human and Martian parents, from a gang of teenage bullies. The Tweenie, Max, had escaped from the orphanage where he was raised following the death of his only friend, a fifteen-year-old Tweenie named Tom. Tweenies are despised and treated as subhuman by the general population, but Scanlon takes pity on Max and invites him into his home. Max has extensively taught himself science from books at the orphanage, and within a week his insight helps Scanlon solve his problem and develop a workable atomic power source. Scanlon decides to formally adopt Max as his son.A year later, Scanlon has become wealthy and famous. He realizes that Max is lonely for others of his kind, and he adopts a young Tweenie woman named Madeline, along with two younger Tweenie girls from Madeline's orphanage. Scanlon then decides to formally adopt all Tweenies on Earth, and to use his fortune to establish an independent town in Ohio, "Tweenietown", where they can run their own society free from prejudice. Max and the other Tweenies repay Scanlon for his help by assisting him in further scientific developments such as a gravity shield.
Fifty years after the adoption of Madeline and the two girls, Tweenietown is a growing concern, with a population of 1,154. An elderly Scanlon asks a government official for help gaining full civil rights for the Tweenies, arguing that they will eventually supplant humans as the dominant species. After the official leaves, Max informs Scanlon that his efforts are in vain; humans now fear the Tweenies and will eventually try to destroy them. Max also reveals that the Tweenies have secretly built three interplanetary spaceships, hoping to create their own civilization on Venus. Offered the chance to accompany them, Scanlon declines and accepts that the Tweenies have no more need of him.
Story background
Half-Breed is set several centuries in the future: at one point, Scanlon notes with relief that it has been two centuries since a war was last fought on Earth, so there is no risk of his newly invented atomic power source being used as a weapon.The presence of the Tweenies on Earth is unexplained by Asimov. Max, who is nineteen when Scanlon saves and adopts him, is the oldest Tweenie in the story, which suggests that the existence of the Tweenies is a recent phenomenon. This in turn implies that interplanetary travel is also a recent phenomenon, an implication supported by Scanlon's description of pre-atomic trips to Mars and Venus as "hazardous gambles". Another implication of the Tweenies' presence on Earth is that the native Martians will not allow them to remain on Mars. Those Tweenies who are on Earth were presumably brought there as infants by human spacemen returning from Mars. Their human parents have abandoned them, and they have become wards of the state, being raised in state-run orphanages.
When Scanlon goes searching for a female Tweenie companion for Max, he only finds one of a suitable age, which implies that the number of Tweenies on Earth at that time is small. Fifty years later, Tweenietown has a population of 1,154, some of which is undoubtedly due to natural increase by the original Tweenie population, and some of which is equally undoubtedly due to the arrival of more orphaned Tweenies from Mars.
In the fifty-one years that pass in the course of the story, the situation for the Tweenies remains unchanged on Earth. The Tweenies lack, as Scanlon notes, political, legal, economic, and social equality with humans. Human hostility towards the Tweenies seems to be permanently ingrained.