I said in my post on Asimov’s birthday a few days ago that I was going to read some stories from The Winds of Change.  I did, getting through the first four stories before my eyelids grew heavy.  The third story is the oldest in the book, “Belief” from 1953.  Asimov notes in his introduction to the story that this was its first appearance in one of his American collections.  (The reasons are beyond the scope of this post.)

I thought I had read it somewhere, perhaps in The Great SF Stories, but the ISFDB said otherwise.  It did, however, show that the story had been published in a later collection, The Alternate Asimov’s.  I had a copy I had picked up years ago that I’d never read, primarily because I didn’t have time to read the original and final versions of the novels The End of Eternity and Pebble in the Sky.  The Alternate Asimovs contains the original versions of those novels.  It also contains both version of the novelette “Belief”.

It seems the version of the story John W. Campbell, Jr. published in Astounding wasn’t Asimov’s preferred version.   Campbell required Asimov to rewrite the ending significantly.  I read the original version, and found the experience quite enlightening. Continue reading →