This is a Foundation prequel, coming after Prelude to Foundation and before Foundation. The book is almost a series of short stories or novelettes — there are several year gaps between these stories. That was a shame in a sense, because each of these separate stories has its won startup cost — the time it…
Tag: isaac_asimov
Robot Visions
This was a pretty short read — in fact I read it on the bus into work this morning. That’s mainly because there are only three short stories in this book which aren’t covered in one of Asimov’s other robot short story collections. The three stories were good, but I am not sure they were…
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series
I’m getting really into reading second hand science fiction from the 1950s onwards. I read a few (but nowhere near all) of the Foundation series as a child, and I remember liking them a lot. Stolen from Wikipedia as well as other online sources, here is a list of the books in The Foundation series…
Robot Dreams
Robot Dreams is another of the robot short story books from Asimov. It is a bit deceptive though and frankly quite annoying because only one of the stories in the book is a robot story, and its not very long.I am of course ignoring the robot stories that already appear in I, Robot and The…
The Complete Robot
This is another of Asimov’s robot short story collections, and many of the stories appear in earlier works. In fact, I would recommend getting I, Robot and this book, and avoiding The Rest of the Robots if you’re not interested in owning a complete collection of books, but do want to have all of the…
Isaac Asimov’s Utopia
Utopia is the third and final Asimov universe book from Allen. It centers around an attempt to accellerate the terraforming of a planet by drastic measures which drive third law robots wild… The measures are so drastic that they endanger humans, whilst protecting a large number of humans. Unfortunately three law robots have trouble seeing…
Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall Short Stories
Asimov published two books named Nightfall 1 and Nightfall 2 which are collections of short stories. I have both of these books in a single volume named “Nightfall’, which is not to be confused with the novel of the same name by Asimov and Silverberg. I was getting quite confused about which robot short stories…
The Rest of the Robots
This is an Asimov short story collection about robots, where the stories are entirely contained in The Complete Robot, although in a different order. These stories are similar in vein to those in I, Robot, although it is odd that not all of the hyperspace development stories are present (perhaps some weren’t written yet?). This…
Prelude To Foundation
Written well after the original Foundation novels, Prelude to Foundation is one of two prequels. The book ties in nicely with Robots and Empire, as well as the other robot novels. Its a good book too, with its 460ish pages only taking a few days to read (I think I knocked it over in about…
Pebble in the Sky
This is Asimov’s first book, and not his best. Its set on an Earth which is radioactive (possibly because of a global nuclear war as supposed in the book, or perhaps because of events described in Robots and Empire). There is a galactic empire at this point, and overall humans have forgotten that they originated…