Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury
The barren crust of Mercury lay covered by a network of wire designed to harness the dazzling blaze of the sun and send it sizzling through hyperspace.

But someone, or something, on tha airless world was sabotaging the top secret mission. Where no life was said to exist, impossible “ghosts” had been seen, and murderous snakes of alien rock had condemned the innocent to death.

It is to this troubled planet that Lucky Starr is sent by the powerful Council of Science. Who or where the enemy is…no one knows. And in order to find out, Starr must face the most deadly—and insane—opponent of his young career!
Fiction, Fiction in English, Kurzgeschichte, American Science Fiction, Science Fiction
Isaac Asimov
Asimov was born sometime between October 4, 1919 and January 2, 1920 in Petrovichi in Smolensk Oblast, RSFSR (now Russia), the son of a Jewish family of millers.  Although his exact date of birth is uncertain, Asimov himself celebrated it on January 2.  His family emigrated to Brooklyn, New York and opened a candy store when he was three years old.  He taught himself to read at the age of five. He began reading the science fiction pulp magazines that his family's store carried. Around the age of eleven, he began to write his own stories, and by age nineteen, he was selling them to the science fiction magazines. He graduated from Columbia University in 1939. He married Gertrude Blugerman in 1942.  During World War II he worked as a civilian at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station.  After the war, he returned to Columbia University and earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1948.  He then joined the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine until 1958, when he became a full-time writer. His first novel, [Pebble in the Sky](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL46402W), was published in 1950. He and his wife divorced in 1973, and he married Janet O. Jeppson the same year. He was a highly prolific writer, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 9,000 letters and postcards.