However, scientists at Saro University are predicting a total eclipse of all the suns at once. The concept of darkness is mysterious and frightening. Astronomical science has not yet reached the point of being able to look beyond the suns. With no nighttime, the stars cannot be seen and therefore are not known. To describe a population to whom the appearance of stars would be a rare phenomenon, Asimov created the planet Lagash where there are six suns and perpetual daylight. Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1941, it now appears in dozens of anthologies, but is perhaps most easily found in Nightfall and Other Stories or another of Asimov's own anthologies The Best of Isaac Asimov. The result was "Nightfall," now one of the most famous science fiction stories of all time. Campbell, Jr., editor of the premier science fiction magazine at that time, asked one of the fledgling writers he mentored an intriguing question: What would happen if people saw the stars only once every thousand years? He postulated that people would go mad and asked twenty-one-year old Isaac Asimov to write a story about it.
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