Pebble in the Sky

Pebble in the Sky is a science fiction novel by the American writer Isaac Asimov, published in 1950 and his first novel. It was written in the summer of 1947 under the title Grow Old with Me, and it is set in the future history he later developed into the Galactic Empire and Foundation novels.

Joseph Schwartz is a retired tailor who is accidentally pitched forward in time by an experiment, and he arrives on an Earth that is radioactive and treated as a backwater by the rest of the galaxy. Because his body has been changed in ways he does not understand, he is taken for a simple old man, and he becomes involved with the people who want the planet's inhabitants treated as people rather than as a problem to be managed.

Asimov uses the book to work out ideas he would return to for the rest of his career, and its argument about who decides what to do with a crowded and damaged world is the same one that runs through the Foundation series.