Category Archives: Isaac Asimov

Asimov’s Ugly Little Boy

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I’m going to revise this blog, which has been dormant for a while, and what better way to start than with an Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) story on his birthday. Asimov is one of the classic authors whose work I want to either reread or read for the first time this year.

I read quite a bit of Asimov when I was in middle school and high school and have dipped into his work from time to time since then. I read the Foundation and robot stories, several of the collections (Nightfall, The Bicentennial Man, The Early Asimov, and I think Buy Jupiter) and a couple of the early novels. There’s still a good bit of his work I haven’t read. Plus, it’s been so long since I read most of the above, it will almost be like coming to those works new. Continue reading →

Asimov’s “The Dying Night”

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Today, January 2, is the birthday of Isaac Asimov (1920-1992). In observance of his birthday, I read “The Dying Night”. It’s a science fiction mystery. I read it in the collection Nine Tomorrows. It doesn’t appear to be in print.

In this story four friends are at a conference, meeting for the first time since they graduated. Ten years have passed and three of them are working at observatories on Mercury, the Moon, and Ceres. The fourth was never able to leave Earth due to a medical condition, and he’s very bitter about it.

He claims to have developed a method of matter transmission, which he is going to present in a couple of day at the conference. Only he dies before he can. One of the three surviving friends is a murderer. The question is which one.

This was a nice little mystery. I’m not sure I buy the psychology behind some of the things the killer does, but Asimov did a good job of putting this one together. I’ve only read a handful of Asimov’s mysteries, but they’ve all been well put together. I’ll have to try to track down more of them.

The Ebb and Flow of Empire

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Over on Adventures Fantastic, I’ve been reviewing the nominees for the Retro Hugos. Isaac Asimov has two stories from his Foundation series on the ballot, one a novelette, and the other a short story. I haven’t read the original Foundation series since I was in high school. These two stories are the last two in Foundation. So I read the whole book.  The last story in the book, “The Merchant Princes”, which was published under the title of “The Big and the Little” before the story that precedes it in the book. There’s a passage in the story where the central character travels outside the Foundation’s sphere of influence and talks to an old man. The old man tells him what’s happened in the Empire, which the Foundation has lost contact with, over the last few decades.

In addition to increasing my interest in history, that made me want to read something with an epic scale.  I immediately thought of Poul Anderson’s Technic future history, particularly the Dominic Flandry subseries. Which made me want to reread H. Beam Piper, Dune, and  and to read the rest of Christopher Ruocchio’s Sun Eater series.  (If you haven’t read Ruocchio, you’re missing out. I’ve only read the first book, but I’ll be buying all the others.) Continue reading →

Asimov Centennial: “I’m in Marsport Without Hilda”

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I said at the first of the year that I was going to post about different Asimov stories. The semester has gotten off to a hectic start, and I’m a little behind on things.

I’ve had a copy of Nine Tomorrows sitting on my shelf for years but have never gotten around to reading it, although I’ve read some of the stories it contains when I read some other anthologies. As best I can recall, this was one of the first science fiction paperbacks I saw when I started reading science fiction way back in late elementary school. For reasons I no longer recall, it wasn’t one of the first I bought, but that Richard Powers cover left an indelible impression on my mind.

The story I decided to read was “I’m in Marsport Without Hilda”. I’ve always liked the title. It gave me an impression of a spaceman alone on an alien world pining for his lover.

Turns out that impression was only part right. [Spoilers below the fold.] Continue reading →

“Nightfall” and Isaac Asimov’s Centennial

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Today, January 2, marks the centennial of the birth of Isaac Asimov (1920-1992). I’m going to try to read/reread some of his major works this year. I read a lot of Asimov in middle school and high school, but I not much after I got my undergraduate degree.

Like him or hate him, there is no denying that Isaac Asimov was one of the most influential science fiction authors of the 20th Century.

I also am reading through The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology right now.   (See this post.) In addition to this being a birthday post, it will also be Part 2 of that read-through. Continue reading →

Frank Herbert vs. Isaac Asimov

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Frank Herbert

Today (October 8) marks the birth of Frank Herbert (1920-1986).  Herbert wrote a number of novels and short stories, but he will always be known as the author of Dune.  Dune was originally serialized in Analog (formerly Astounding) starting in December 1963.  It was published in book form in 1965.  The original publisher was Chilton.  You know, the one that does the auto manuals.

Dune is set in a galactic empire, which is of course ruled by an Emperor.  Herbert wrote a number of sequels, and his son Brian has coauthored additional sequels and prequels with Kevin J. Anderson.

John W. Campbell, Jr.

Herbert wasn’t the first, nor was he the last, to use a galactic empire in a work of science fiction.  One of the most prominent people to do the same was Isaac Asimov (who also wasn’t the first).  Asimov started his Foundation series in the pages of Astounding roughly two decades earlier.  It’s interesting to note that John W. Campbell was the editor for the original appearances of both series.  I’m not going to go there in this post, because that sounds like a Ph.D. dissertation in Literature.

While comparisons have been made between the Dune series and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Asimov intentionally patterned the Foundation stories after Gibbon’s work.  Several novels were set in the same universe before the time of the Foundation. Asimov would later go on to write additional novels in the last decade of his life and tie the series in with his robot stories, both the short stories concerning Susan Calvin and the detective novels starring Elijah Bailey and R. Daneel Olivaw.  There were also a few sequels coauthored and/or authored by other writers.

Isaac Asimov

Both Asimov and Herbert have been dead for a number of years.  The influence of these two works has been tremendous.  If you go into any bookstore today, most of the books by Asimov will be from the Foundation series, and most of the books by Herbert will be from the Dune series.  Few, if any, of the titles you find by these authors will be outside these series.

Dune seems to be the more popular of the two at the moment, in part because new Dune titles are regularly being published, and also because there’s another film in the works.  Foundation seems to be languishing a bit in comparison.

I read all the Foundation books Asimov wrote, although not all the galactic empire novels and none of the sequels.  I’ve only read the original Dune.  Dune Messiah and Children of Dune are in the TBR pile.  I intend to reread Dune later this year; I first read it about 15 years ago.  I read the original Foundation Trilogy…much longer ago than that, like in high school.

So I’m toying with the idea of reading the first three Dune books and the original Foundation Trilogy.  This will be over the next year or three.  I’ve got some other things to get through first.  It will be interesting to see how they have stood the test of time from when I was younger.

As for what prompted this idea, well, that’s the topic of an upcoming post.

 

Update on the Pre-Campbell Challenge

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No, I haven’t given up on this challenge, but I have had to put it on hold due to time restrictions.

I’m going to relaunch it sometime in January or early February.  There are some things related to my wife’s cancer and my job that could interfere with restarting, so I’m not sure of the exact start date.

I’m going to modify the challenge a bit and focus initially on two anthologies.  One will be Before the Golden Age, edited by Isaac Asimov.  The other is Science Fiction of the 30’s, edited by Damon Knight.

The Asimov anthology is considerably longer, and he broke the book up into years, with autobiographical essays between the stories.  Knight, on the other hand, has divided his book into three sections that are basically Beginning, Middle, and End, although his terminology is a little different.  In both books, there are multiple stories per each section.

There’s also very little overlap between the two books.  So here’s what I’m going to do.  I’m going to read all the stories in a section and write a single post about them.  This means, of course or at least of course for those who can do math, that I will be posting more about Before the Golden Age than I will about Science Fiction of the 30’s.

I’ll also try to compare and contrast the two editors’ tastes.  We’ll see how well that works.

I read both of these anthologies decades years ago.  I’m pretty sure I was in 8th or 9th grade when I read BtGA, because I can still remember the second hand shop where I bought it.  (That was a marvelous place, full of books by authors I had only heard about or only read a short story by, probably in a Robert Silverberg anthology in the junior high library.)  I’m sure it was later in high school, possibly college or even early graduate school, when I read Science Fiction of the 30’s.

I know I greatly  enjoyed both books, and they both had a lasting impact on my reading tastes, especially the Asimov collection.  So that will be one of my projects at the beginning of the year.

Some Thoughts on National Science Fiction Day and Isaac Asimov’s Birthday

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Today is January 2, the accepted day on which Isaac Asimov is considered to have been born in 1920.  It’s also National Science Fiction Day here in the States.

I’d forgotten today was National Science Fiction Day.  Probably because I haven’t been paying attention.

I wrote yesterday that I intended to read more science fiction this year.  My imagination was captured by science fiction almost as soon as I could read, if not before.  We had a couple of books about rockets and space exploration.  Some of my earliest memories are my parents reading them to me.  I don’t recall if they were reprints of some articles Willy Ley wrote or not. I remember they were heavily illustrated.  Not surprising since they were for kids.

Star Wars was what really kindled my imagination, sending me to look for science fiction at both the school library and the public library.  I remember the main branch of the Wichita Falls library had an entire shelf, maybe two, in the adult section for their science fiction books.  And I also bought science fiction at the mall and the flea market.

Soon I was reading Ray Bradbury, Alan Dean Foster, Jack Williamson, and of course Isaac Asimov.  I’d seen a copy of The Foundation Trilogy on that shelf in the public library but I hadn’t checked it out.  I didn’t have any idea what it was about, and the paperbacks that were in print at the time (shown above) weren’t very informative.

Fast forward a couple of years to when I was in middle school and joined the Science Fiction Book Club.  One of the books I got with my introductory order was the club’s edition of The Foundation Trilogy, shown on the left.  The cover wasn’t anymore informative as to what the story was about than the paperbacks.  I didn’t care.  By that time I’d read I, Robot and some of Asimov’s other short stories in some of the anthologies in the school library.

I dove in and enjoyed the original three novels.  A few years later, when Asimov wrote some additional volumes and tied them into the robot stories, I read those as well, although I didn’t enjoy them as much.

I’m probably not going to read any of Asimov’s short fiction as a birthday observance.  Instead I’m going to honor his memory by writing. Asimov wrote literally hundreds of books in his lifetime. I doubt my output will ever be anything close to his, but I still need to write.  This blog post has been a good warm-up.

As for reading Asimov, should The Foundation Trilogy be one of the works I revisit this year? Or should I read some of the robot stories or other short fiction? Maybe a novel of his I haven’t read?  There are several of them, such as The Gods Themselves and The Currents of Space.  What do ya’ll think?

Robots for Asimov

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i-robotI apologize for the campaign-esque sound of the title.  I’m still trying to get 2016 out of my head.  Anyway, I said yesterday at Adventures Fantastic that I’m going to be reading more of the classics of the field.  Furthermore I specifically named Asimov’s robot stories as one of the things I’ll be reading.

It’s Asimov’s 97th birthday today.  He was born January 2, 1920, in Russia.  I first read the robot stories in 7th grade.  It’s been more than a decade (going on two decades now) since I last read one of them.  I’ve read a few Asimov stories over the past year; I’m about a third of the way through The Winds of Change right now.

The robot stories have all been collected in The Complete Robot.  I’ve got a copy around somewhere, if I an ever find the darn thing.  I’m looking forward to diving into them.  Robots used to be pretty  ubiquitous in science fiction, but you don’t see them that much these days.  They’ve been supplanted by AIs.  Still, I like the old-fashioned robots, and Asimov did them better than anyone.

Asimov and the Editorial Hand of John W. Campbell

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The Winds of ChangeI said in my post on Asimov’s birthday a few days ago that I was going to read some stories from The Winds of Change.  I did, getting through the first four stories before my eyelids grew heavy.  The third story is the oldest in the book, “Belief” from 1953.  Asimov notes in his introduction to the story that this was its first appearance in one of his American collections.  (The reasons are beyond the scope of this post.)

I thought I had read it somewhere, perhaps in The Great SF Stories, but the ISFDB said otherwise.  It did, however, show that the story had been published in a later collection, The Alternate Asimov’s.  I had a copy I had picked up years ago that I’d never read, primarily because I didn’t have time to read the original and final versions of the novels The End of Eternity and Pebble in the Sky.  The Alternate Asimovs contains the original versions of those novels.  It also contains both version of the novelette “Belief”.

It seems the version of the story John W. Campbell, Jr. published in Astounding wasn’t Asimov’s preferred version.   Campbell required Asimov to rewrite the ending significantly.  I read the original version, and found the experience quite enlightening. Continue reading →