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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
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and question them about human interaction and methods of human reproduction, which is quite different from theirs. The aliens reproduce asexually and the head researcher on humans regards sexual reproduction as an unstable trait that would make humanity too dangerous and worthy of extermination.
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According to Asimov, in "1938-39 ... for some half a dozen issues or so, a magazine I won't name" published "spicy" stories about "the hot passion of alien monsters for
Earthwomen. Clothes were always getting ripped off and breasts were described in a variety of elliptical phrases" for its "few
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reproductive activities after all. The alien researcher monitors them remotely and watches the process, but the alien spaceship jumps through space and breaks the monitoring before it can show the results to the rest of the alien crew.
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However, it has trouble convincing the rest of the aliens, who cannot imagine two different sexes within the same species, nor the possibility of genes from two different individuals combining.
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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.
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on the pulp era, was published called "Girls of the Slime God". The article proposed — not too seriously — that pulp science fiction stories were concerned with aliens and
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visit Earth and kidnap two humans, a man and a woman. They take them up from the surface to their
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readers" before "the magazine died a deserved death". The magazine in question was
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344:Internet Speculative Fiction Database
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340:"What Is This Thing Called Love?"
22:"What Is This Thing Called Love?"
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512:What Is This Thing Called Love?
135:What Is This Thing Called Love?
16:Short story by Isaac Asimov
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562:Short stories by Isaac Asimov
148:. The story was requested by
519:The Machine That Won the War
297:Nightfall, and other stories
390:Nightfall and Other Stories
349:"Playboy and the Slime God"
315:. Ames, IA: Obscura Press.
244:Nightfall and Other Stories
178:"Playboy and the Slime God"
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259:from the other end of the
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211:Marvel
160:satire
463:Flies
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