James Nicoll Reviews

Isaac Asimov’s 1957 Earth Is Room Enough is a speculative fiction collection.

The unifying theme for this collection is ​“stories set on Earth.” This isn’t due to some There Is Only One Earth connection — even though I remembered it that way — but because Asimov got needled about always writing star-spanning SF. The obvious comparison here is Anderson’s The Queen of Air and Darkness and Other Stories, compiled for thematically-related reasons. Or it would be if I’d reviewed that collection. Which I have not.

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Isaac Asimov’s 1959 Nine Tomorrows¹ is a collection of late 1950s works. Nine Tomorrows is mostly, but not quite entirely, science fiction.

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1957’s The Naked Sun is the second of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction mystery robot novels¹.

Having successfully resolved the matter of Spacer Roj Nemennuh Sarton to everyone’s satisfaction (save perhaps Roj), New York police detective Elijah Baley discovers that the reward for accomplishing a difficult task is an even more difficult task.

Summoned to Washington, DC, Plainclothesman Baley discovers he has been assigned another Spacer murder. The last one took him to unfamiliar Spacertown. This new case will send Baley somewhere far more exotic.

But first, some background.

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Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh’s 1983 Starships is a science fiction anthology on the theme of starships.

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Isaac Asimov’s 1968 Asimov’s Mysteries is a mystery collection — mostly but not entirely science fiction — containing only stories written by Isaac Asimov himself.

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1985’s The Last Man on Earth was edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, & Charles G. Waugh. The theme uniting the anthology is straightforward and obvious from the title: each story focuses on the last man on Earth. Well, very nearly.

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Isaac Asimov’s massive 1974 Before the Golden Age is, as its cover subtitle promises, a ​“Science Fiction Anthology of the 1930s.” In one sense, the subtitle is accurate: the stories predate the supposed golden age of SF, that period between 1938 and 1950, after John W. Campbell, Jr. became editor of Astounding and before Galaxy and The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy offered a broader vision than that offered by Campbell and his idiosyncratic tastes. 

In another sense, the subtitle is quite false. 

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Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh’s 1984 Supermen is the third volume in the Isaac Asimov’s Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction anthology series.

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1984’s The Science Fictional Olympics is the second anthology in a ten-volume series, Isaac Asimov’s Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction. Editors: Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh. 

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Isaac Asimov’s 1955 The End of Eternity is a standalone¹ time-travel thriller.

A secretive cabal of Eternals (recruited from the mundanes of various periods) guide human destiny. They monopolize time travel and monitor human societies over a span of 70,000 centuries. They steer societies away from extremes and disasters, towards sustainable optimums. Andrew Harlan is a loyal member of the cabal, known as Eternity. 

Or rather, he was. Now he is working to destroy Eternity.

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