Lucky Starr series


Lucky Starr is the hero of a series of science fiction books by Isaac Asimov, using the pen name "Paul French" and intended for children.
On 23 March 1951 Asimov met with his agent, Frederik Pohl, and Walter I. Bradbury, then the science fiction editor at Doubleday & Co., who had a proposal for him. Pohl and Bradbury wanted Asimov to write a juvenile science fiction novel that would serve as the basis for a television series. Fearing that the novel would be adapted into the "uniformly awful" programming he saw flooding the television channels, he decided to publish it under the pseudonym "Paul French".
Asimov began work on the novel, David Starr: Space Ranger, on 10 June. He completed it on 29 July, and it was published by Doubleday in January 1952. Although plans for the television series fell through, Asimov continued to write novels in the series, eventually producing six. A seventh, Lucky Starr and the Snows of Pluto, was planned, but abandoned when Asimov elected to devote himself to writing non-fiction almost exclusively. With no worries about being associated with an embarrassing televised version, Asimov decided to abandon the pretense that he was not the author. He brought the Three Laws of Robotics into Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury, which he wrote in his autobiography "was a dead giveaway to Paul French's identity for even the most casual reader".
Eventually, Asimov used his own name in later editions. Some cover pages bear his name only, while others credit "Isaac Asimov writing as Paul French".

Publishing history

Although the hero's given name – used on the first book – was "David", Asimov decided this lacked vigor, so the titles of all the later books used his nickname "Lucky".
These novels have a long and varied publishing history. They came out in hardcover with Doubleday in the first edition. Bantam was the latest, in 1993, to bring out the series in 3 volumes, publishing pairs of titles together. In 2001 the Science Fiction Book Club published all six novels as a collection in a single volume, under the title The Complete Adventures of Lucky Starr.
The British first editions of all six novels omit the prefix altogether, being titled Space Ranger, Oceans of Venus, etc. A later British paperback edition of the 1970s, published by NEL, restored the original titles – but in numbering them from 1 to 6, on the covers, in fact published them in the wrong order.
The first book was translated into French in 1954 under the title Sur la planète rouge with the original pseudonym, Paul French. It was published in the "Anticipation" science fiction imprint of Fleuve noir. It was later adapted as a French comic book twice, in 1975 and 1992.
Three books were also published in Dutch. Titles were, in order of the original American series:
He carefully introduced astronomical and physical concepts which the scientific knowledge of the time supported. In later editions, he added a preface pointing out that new scientific discoveries have rendered some locations and concepts obsolete: Mercury does not present only one side to the Sun, and Venus is not covered by a global ocean, for example.