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If you've watch science fiction on TV you might naturally assume that all world that are capable of supporting life would be safe for any human to simply walk onto without a space suit but in the real world the human body is quite sensitive to small things like heat, poison gas, and gravity, but none of these mean that some other type of life couldn't exist. This is clear on earth as there are numerous environments in which there is considerable life but humans can not exist, the most obvious is in the water with more life than the ground, but on other worlds it might no be water. Isaac Asimov explores that idea, along with the idea of nonperforming in the story "Founding Fathers".

One of the interesting things about founding fathers is that Asimov was given the picture for the cover of a magazine and asked to write the story. This is a situation that with most authors would lead to either a mediocre story or one that had very little to do with the picture itself, but Isaac Asimov is not the average author and he was able to create a story that went better with this picture than most.

The story begins with a small group of men being forced to land on a world due to damage to their ship. These are explorers, and the odds of being truly stuck are very low but they are and what is worse the atmosphere is ammonia based, but the good news is that the ammonia based plant life is very easy to disrupt and Asimov explains this well, but it uses that hope as the general point of the story. The men spend most of the story trying to grow earth based plants but they are unable to grow because of the toxins in the ground. And eventually the men begin to give up, and in many ways their death is the key to the growth of plants which eventually are able to transform the planet into a habitable world, leading to the name of the story.

The examination of an alien atmosphere and biosphere as well as people who are alone and how they react to that environment is one of the nearly infinitely examinable ideas in science fiction and when well written they can create truly interesting stories without any of the rampaging aliens or strange technology that can sometimes create mediocre science fiction.

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