Sucker Bait - Wikipedia
Sucker Bait is a science fiction novella by American writer Isaac Asimov. It was first serialized in the February and March 1954 issues of Astounding Science Fiction, and reprinted in the 1955 collection The Martian Way and Other Stories. It has also been adapted as an episode of the BBC anthology television series Out of the Unknown.
Asimov was approached in 1953 by the editor Fletcher Pratt, of Twayne Press, with a story proposal: a scientist would create a world, and then Asimov, Poul Anderson, and Virginia Kidd (although Anderson stated that the third writer was Kidd's husband, James Blish) would write novellas set in that world.[1]
The three novellas would then be published as a book, together with an essay by the scientist who created the planet. This formula, which Pratt called a "Twayne Triplet", had already resulted in the book The Petrified Planet in 1952.
The scenario created was that of a binary star system in the globular cluster, Messier 13, with an Earthlike planet called Troas (or more informally, "Junior") located at one of the system's Lagrangian points. An earlier expedition to Troas for colonization had suffered some mysterious disaster, and a second expedition is being sent to find out if "Junior" was suitable for colonization, and to find out what happened to the first expedition.
