Isaac Asimov’s Robots and Aliens Book 3: Intruder by Robert Thurston

The book opens up in 1949 on the day of a mysterious accident at Chicago’s Institute of Nuclear Research. Joseph Schwartz, while walking around on the other side of Chicago is somehow caught in an expanding beam of energy that transports him into an unfamiliar place. Actually, he has not traveled to another place but another time. Earth’s land is largely covered in radioactive soil, so that it can only support 20 million people. The result of this is the common practice of terminating anyone that cannot work or when they reach the age of sixty as a form of strict population control. Most people don’t resent this practice but rather look at as a way for making room for the young. (more…)

Timeline discussion:
Here are a couple quotes — “Atomic warfare had done its worst to Earth. Most of it was hopelessly radioactive and useless.” and “The radioactivity of the soil was a vast sea of iridescent blue, sparkling in strange festoons that spelled out the manner in which the nuclear bombs had once landed, a full generation before the force-field defense against nuclear explosions had been developed, so that no other world could commit suicide in just that fashion again.” — The Stars, Like Dust (more…)