Asimov's 40 Year-Old Essays Out of Date? Never!

Isaac Asimov needs no introduction. At least, I hope he doesn’t, even though he passed away almost 17 years ago. His science fiction books are still well known – the Positronic Robot series and the Foundation and Empire series are still in print to this day. So are some of his non-fiction works.

Unfortunately, the essays he wrote for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which were collected into twenty-three anthologies – the first one published in 1962 and the last one in 1990, have not fared so well. They are all out of print and have been for some time.

Worse than that, they are probably no longer available at your local library, either.

And that is a pity.

The fact that they are out of print is perhaps not egregious, but the fact that libraries across the country are “de-accessioning” them, is. (I know they’re being de-accessioned because when I put together my collection of all of Asimov’s essay anthologies last year, more than half of them came from libraries. To add insult to injury, they’d charge a penny for each book, and $3.99 for postage! No Asimov book deserves to be sold for a penny!

You will ask, with the pace of the advance of science what it is, why do I believe that science books that are anywhere between 40 to 18 years old are still worth reading?

Well, to begin with, each of Asimov’s essay anthology contains 17 essays, all on a variety of topics. A handful are concerned with math, a handful with astronomy and assorted space sciences, a few with natural science, and so on. For each of these essays, Asimov either waxes historical, explaining how a certain principle was discovered and by whom, or he explains the principle itself, in simple concepts that most people can understand. (I do not claim to have grasped every principle that Asimov explains, but many that had puzzled me, he does make clear.)

Therefore, much of the information Asimov covers in any given essay is still valuable and of use today.

And what of the information that is out of date? Well – that’s worth reading too, because it is just as “historical” as the rest of the history Asimov covers in these essays.

What types of topics does Asimov discuss? Well, he spent a lot of time, in his later essays (the 1980s) trying to warn t he world about the dangers of overpopulation. He mentioned global warming in an essay in his very first anthology, way back in 1962.

Asimov was a polymath, his interests were wide and varied. He discussed chemistry, biochemistry, oceanography, astronomy, exploration, and so on. (Another thing that makes Asimov so fun to read is his habit, after about 1963, to begin his essays with a couple of paragraphs of personal anecdote, which are fun to read.)

Here’s a list of all the essay collections – collected from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. (Asimov has other essay collections – he contributed essays to a wide variety of magazines, but the ones specifically form F & SF are the best.)

Fact and Fancy 1962
View from a Height 1963
Adding a Dimension 1964
Of Time, Space & Other Things 1965
From Earth to Heaven 1966
Science, Numbers and I 1968
The Solar System and Back 1970
The Stars in Their Course 1971
Left Hand of the Electron 1972
The Tragedy of the Moon 1973
Of Matters Great & Small 1975
The Planet That Wasn’t 1976
Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright 1977
The Road to Infinity 1979
The Sun Shines Bright 1981
Asimov on Science Fiction 1982
Counting the Eons 1983
X Stands for Unknown 1984
The Subatomic Monster 1985
Far as Human Eye Could See 1987
The Relativity of Wrong 1988
Out of Everywhere 1990
The Secret of The Universe 1990

So, the fact that libraries are getting rid of these very valuable books is a pity, but on the other hand, it means that you can accumulate them all for very little money. They will be invaluable to your library – not to mention your own knowledge of the scientific world around you, and its history.

Asimov's 40 Year-Old Essays Out of Date? Never!