Author Language English Publication type Periodical | Country United States Published in Amazing Stories | |
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Genre(s) Science fiction short story | ||
"What Is This Thing Called Love?" is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. The story was requested by Cele Goldsmith Lalli, editor of Amazing Stories, as a satire of a story in Playboy magazine called "Girls for the Slime God", which proposed — not too seriously — that all science fiction stories were concerned with aliens and sex. Asimov set out to write a story telling how a sex-interested alien and humans might really interact. The story appeared in the March 1961 issue of Amazing as "Playboy and the Slime God", but when Asimov included it in his 1969 collection Nightfall and Other Stories he retitled it "What Is This Thing Called Love?" Goldsmith Lalli rewrote the story's last three paragraphs, a change Asimov regarded as a great improvement, and which he kept.
Plot synopsis
Non-human aliens from the other end of the Galaxy visit Earth and kidnap two humans, a man and a woman. They take them up from the surface to their spaceship and question them about human interaction and methods of human reproduction, which is quite different from theirs.
Predictably, the humans react with great indignation when requested to demonstrate human reproduction, and the aliens finally give up on their research and return the humans to Earth.
As the aliens return to their planet, the two humans find themselves attracted to each other, and wind up engaging in reproductive activities after all.