The Best Isaac Asimov Books

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Before we begin, could you tell us a little about who Isaac Asimov was?

Isaac Asimov was a science fiction writer born in Russia; he immigrated when he was a child to the US. He was born in 1920, died in 1992, and during the back half of his adult life, he was the most famous science fiction writer in America. He started writing for the pulp magazines when he was a teenager, wrote short stories like the ones in I, Robot, and in the Foundation series, which I’ll be talking about in a minute. Then he became famous for two other reasons, which I think are important to note.

One is that he was a really good science explainer. He became a nonfiction writer around the time of Sputnik, when people were looking for people who could talk about the sciences, and educate them about these concepts during the Cold War. He was really good at that. He was very distinctive looking, he had these big black glasses and these big sideburns – he was one of the most recognizable writers imaginable. He would go on talk shows, and give talks and public speeches. He was a celebrity in a way that very few writers ever have been.

The other thing that we should talk about up front is that he was incredibly prolific. He wrote over 400 books, in all of the major categories of the Dewey Decimal System except for philosophy. By some measures, he is the most productive writer in American history. So he became famous for that. Trying to whittle those down to five titles is actually pretty challenging…

And we appreciate you taking on the challenge! Could you introduce us to your first choice, The Asimov Chronicles?

So I’ll say up front that this book is a little bit hard to find… I wanted to choose a good anthology of his short fiction, which is the best place to start. This is out of print, so if you want to get a copy, you might have to hunt around for a bit.

The reason that I wanted to use this book as an entry point is that the obvious place to start with Asimov’s short fiction is I, Robot, a collection of what are called ‘the robot stories’, which are probably his most famous short stories. Those stories are historically important, but they have not aged very well. I think modern readers would have trouble understanding why they were so appealing to people without making a mental adjustment. You can’t ignore them entirely, but I would not recommend people start there. This anthology includes most of the major robot stories, but also other stories that I think are better, more accessible, and which Asimov himself would probably say were better written and more interesting stories than the ones that he became famous for.

All you really need to know about the robot stories is what are called ‘the Three Laws of Robotics,’ which laid out the rules by which robots interact with human beings and were developed by Asimov in collaboration with John W. Campbell. These are important concepts. A lot of the stories in the Robot series are based around these rules and the surprising or mysterious ways that robots interpret them. Those are worth knowing because they are famous, both within science fiction and in AI and robotics research, where they are also often cited. The stories themselves usually hinge on a twist, a little surprise ending, based on a clever interpretation of those three laws.

The experience of reading the stories is mixed. For a lot of them, if someone just tells you the premise and explains the twist, that is almost as good as reading the story itself. These are early stories for Asimov, and he is not a writer who is particularly concerned by style, by world building, by character – all these things that we associate with science fiction. They aren’t really there in the robot story. That’s why I started with that caveat: even though they’re very famous and important, I would not start there.

So which stories should we start with?

I would start instead with a couple of stories in this collection. The first is called ‘Nightfall’, and it’s a story that Asimov published in Astounding Science Fiction magazine, the pulp magazine in which most of his major stories appeared. ‘Nightfall’ was a story that turned him from a second-tier writer into someone seen as one of the best science fiction writers in the pulps. He became an acclaimed writer, at least among fans, because of the story ‘Nightfall.’ It’s a story about a planet that has never seen the stars. They have a somewhat complicated solar system with multiple suns, and usually at least one of these suns is in the sky at any given time. Then, every few thousand years, they all set, and the stars become visible. The question of the story is, what would happen if mankind were to see the stars for the first time in, say, a thousand years?

The story is very dark. It doesn’t end well, I’ll say. But it’s a very interesting story, a very engaging story, and also pointed out some themes that become important later on. Campbell and Asimov worked on the story together. It points to issues of psychology and the rise and fall of civilizations, which are going to be important… If you’re going to read one thing by Asimov, I’d read ‘Nightfall’.

Another story I want to highlight is called ‘The Last Question’, which Asimov would probably have said was his best story. I think at one point he said it was the best science fiction story that he ever wrote, and maybe the best science fiction story that anyone ever wrote. It’s pretty mind-blowing. It’s a story that spans millions of years in just a few pages, and it’s about the problem of, What does humanity do when the universe starts to wind down? Physics tells us that eventually the universe will enter a state of what currently we call ‘heat death’, where entropy has risen to the point where nothing could ever happen again. This is baked into the laws of physics. Is there a way to reverse this process? Is there a way to get out of this inevitable dying close to history? Asimov suggests a solution, which I don’t want to spoil – it’s deservedly famous, and pretty impressive.

You mentioned Campbell’s collaboration with Asimov on ‘Nightfall’ and on the Laws of Robotics. In your book Astounding, you detail more about their relationship – and it really does seem to be an amazing relationship, where Campbell more or less hands pitches to Asimov. Could you talk a little bit more about how those two worked together?

Yes, this is one of my favourite subjects to talk about! So Asimov, as I said before, was a very famous person during the last half of his life and is an iconic figure. But during the period we’re talking about here, he was a very young man. He was eighteen, I think, when he first met Campbell. They met only because Asimov happened to live in Brooklyn. He could take the train to the Astounding offices in Manhattan, meet Campbell, and give him his latest submissions by hand. It took him a while to break into the magazine. He submitted eight stories before the ninth one was accepted. Campbell I think was twenty-seven when he took over the magazine – so older than Asimov, but not by much – and he saw Asimov as a protégé, and an experiment.

Up to that point, most of Campbell’s authors were older writers who had come up from other pulp genres like Westerns or adventure fiction, and they were transferring these stock plots into space. The results could be a little bit formulaic. Asimov was a fan first: he grew up loving the pulps because he could read them in his father’s candy store for free, and so he’d read all these magazines. He was a member of the generation of science fiction fans who wanted to write science fiction for its own sake. They weren’t cynically trying to earn a living by writing stories as some of the other pulp writers were. They really loved the genre for itself and wanted to break into it.

So Campbell sees Asimov, this young guy, and says, “What can I use you for? What can I turn you into? You’re eager, you’re smart, you’re still very raw. You’re willing to do pretty much whatever I request.” So he developed Asimov, gradually, and got him to the point where he could start to give him ideas.

The Three Laws of Robotics was an idea that came up in their conversations at the Astounding office. Campbell essentially pitched the three laws to Asimov, who then incorporated them into his work. The idea for ‘Nightfall’ was one that Campbell had on his own and gave to Asimov. Asimov said later that he didn’t know whether Campbell had deliberately given him that idea, or if he just happened to be the one writer who showed up at the office that day – and if it had been somebody else, Campbell would have maybe given the idea to a different writer altogether.

So that’s the dynamic. When we get to Foundation in a minute, you’ll see how Campbell shaped those stories as well. The first half of Asimov’s career is pretty much shaped by that relationship. Campbell is an incredibly important figure in the history of science fiction. He was very personally intimidating, a dominant, charismatic person in the room. And Asimov was receptive. He was eager, and looking for a mentor figure. So for all these stories that we’re talking about, in this first half of Asimov’s writing career, Campbell is absolutely the unseen, unspoken person who’s shaping a lot of them.

Let’s turn to your second choice, then, which you just mentioned. Please tell us about the Foundation trilogy.

The Foundation series was originally short stories that were published in Astounding Science Fiction magazine over the course of many years. They were collected initially in three books: Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation. You can get these all individually, or you can get them in one volume.

I do recommend that people also pick and choose here, because as I said with the robot stories, not all these stories have aged well. The best way I can think of to explain what I mean is by pointing to the recent Apple TV adaptation of Foundation, a big-budget TV series that David S. Goyer developed and that has its merits. When I first heard about it, I was really curious because the Foundation series does not give you a lot of material to work with if you’re trying to adapt it into a TV show. Until much later in the series, there are no real characters. There is not a lot of action and there isn’t really a lot of world building. So what do you have to work with?  The answer is that you have one idea, and that’s something called ‘psychohistory.’

Psychohistory comes out of Campbell and Asimov’s conversations. It’s the idea that you can have a science of prediction, where you’d use things like symbolic logic to predict the future in a detailed way for centuries, and figure out small interventions in the present that can change the direction that history takes later on. This is a really good, exciting idea. That idea alone, I think, is what has made the Foundation series, at least the earlier stories, so famous. The reading experience can be a little bit mixed, but the psychohistory idea itself is really compelling. This is an idea that has changed lives. People have become, say, economists because they were so intrigued by psychohistory – people like Paul Krugman, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist; and Newt Gingrich, who has talked about how the idea of psychohistory was a huge influence on him… So just the premise is strong enough to take people over the limitations of the earlier stories.

I would recommend people get a copy of the complete trilogy. I would read the first two stories as collected, ‘The Psychohistorians’ and ‘The Encyclopedists,’ which give you a sense of the background. They introduce you to this guy, Hari Seldon, who is the inventor of psychohistory (although he disappears from the story). After the first two installments, I would then go to Wikipedia and read some summaries for the remaining stories up until one called ‘The Mule,’ which is a long novella and is the second half of Foundation and Empire.

‘The Mule’ is a really good story – the story where the potential of the series is realized. It takes place in a galaxy that has been colonized by a single Galactic Empire. It’s an entirely human empire; there are really no aliens in any significant way in the story, and it’s essentially analogous to the Roman Empire. Asimov was inspired to write the story in part by Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His initial pitch to Campbell was, “I want to do that, but on a galactic scale. I want to write a story about the decline and fall of the Galactic Empire.” Campbell liked the idea and said, “Let’s make psychohistory a part of this.” Psychohistory is much more Campbell’s contribution than Asimov’s. I think Asimov was actually a little bit uncomfortable with the idea, but it’s part of the story now.

Psychohistorian Hari Seldon has foreseen the fall of the Galactic Empire, and he has made plans to shorten the duration of the ensuing Dark Age. He can’t prevent it entirely, but he can make it shorter, and he can reduce human suffering by planning ahead and making a few small interventions at crucial points.

So the first few stories in the series are following up on this idea. It’s not especially dramatic – because Hari Seldon has foreseen a lot of these things. The characters have to figure out what he foresaw, but it’s dramatically unsatisfying to have a story where so much of it seems predetermined, right? If Hari Seldon foresaw what was going to happen, then where’s the suspense? Where’s the surprise? So what Campbell essentially said was, “We’re going to have something disrupt the Seldon plan. We’re going to introduce a new factor that Hari didn’t see coming.” That takes the form of the Mule, who is a telepath, a mutant who is born with the ability to mould minds, psychically. It takes the story in a new direction. As a result, it becomes the best Foundation story because it challenges the premise in a way that I don’t think Asimov saw coming.

In your own book, you describe your next choice as a ‘secret repudiation’ of Foundation. Could you tell us about The End of Eternity? It’s the only full-length novel on your list…

So Asimov wrote a bunch of novels, and this is my personal favourite. I think it’s probably the best. It’s not as famous as some of the other ones, but I wanted to highlight it.

Asimov is, as I say, not entirely comfortable with the idea of psychohistory. It was Campbell’s hobby horse. It came out of World War II and worries about what was going to happen in Europe. The first Foundation story came out even before Pearl Harbor. One way that we can cope with the uncertainty of current events is to wonder, is there a way we can predict what’s going to happen? That impulse is one that we can all relate to, and it was very strong in 1940. So Campbell’s idea of psychohistory came out of his larger project, which was to try to figure out a science of prediction – how do we talk about the future in a logical way?

Asimov accepted it, and he put it into the stories because Campbell was his editor and had a lot of influence over his work. But I think secretly he was always a little bit uneasy with the idea, and so he ended up writing this book called The End of Eternity, which to me is a stealth repudiation of the premise of Foundation.

This novel is about another organization called Eternity, which is applying some of the same principles of the psychohistorians to this universe; except that they’re time travellers, so they can move up and down the timeline. The psychohistorians are restricted — they can make interventions in the present to change the future — but Eternity can go back into the past and also make changes there to achieve an outcome that they want. Their goal is to ensure the safety and security of humanity, so they are trying to increase happiness, they say, and trying to reduce risk. The result is that in this timeline, mankind doesn’t develop space travel until much later than it otherwise would have – so there’s no Galactic Empire, and they miss out on the chance to colonize the stars. That’s the trade-off –  Eternity has chosen the low-risk path for mankind, but it ends up being the path of mediocrity. The question is, is it worth having security if you are giving up the chance for something more?

By the end, Asimov has a character essentially say that Eternity are psychopaths. They are deciding unilaterally what is the optimum path for humanity to take without consulting anyone else. And this, to me, is quietly criticizing the Foundation series. Hari Seldon and the psychohistorians are making choices that affect billions of people in secret. On the question of who gets to decide the optimum future, the Foundation series rigs the odds in its favour by saying, “We’re just trying to diminish this dark age.” But in real life, that question is very complicated. I think The End of Eternity is Asimov’s attempt to get at some of the problems presented by that premise in a way that the Foundation series does not.

That’s the end of the fiction on your list today.  Before we turn to Asimov’s nonfiction, I wanted to ask you about your work documenting this relationship and process in Astounding, because it’s such an interesting companion to the fiction… There’s so much detail on the creative process, really down to the level of one-on-one conversations. I wondered if you could tell us a bit about the material for that and how you went about that research?

Yes, so this is my book –  Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. It originated as a biography of John Campbell, who I think is an incredibly interesting figure – very controversial, for good reason – and there’d never been a big biography of him before. My editor suggested that I expand it to include other authors because Campbell is really important, but not as famous as Asimov and Heinlein and Hubbard. So the idea was that we can have a book that has more popular appeal if we make it a group biography – which I think was a great note, and made the book much more interesting.

So Campbell was my through line. I decided that I could probably shed a lot of light on the history of science fiction through the lens of his life. There was a ton of material that had never been really explored. He kept most of his letters, at least from the 40s onward, so there is a massive amount of correspondence that you can look at to see how these authors interacted. There are a lot of memoirs by other writers that talk about Campbell because he was a huge force in a lot of people’s lives. And I could go back and look at the magazines, which are fascinating. I ended up looking at every page of Astounding Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction that was published during Campbell’s lifetime: the stories, of course, but also the editorials, the letters column, the ads; it was a real deep dive into this period for me. It was really exciting. There were things about all these writers that no one had ever really talked about before, that I was able to get at by looking at them through this perspective.

One thing that really comes out in Astounding is that Asimov is a real ‘golden age’ sci fi writer, with his interest in contemporary science – being a member of the Futurians, and so on…

The timing was crucial. As a teenager, Asimov came around at just the right time to be influenced by Campbell and to play a big role in science fiction at this formative period. But he also had the chance to play a huge role in popular science writing at just the right time. I mentioned Sputnik in 1957, which created a crisis of American education. People were asking themselves, “Are American children being educated well enough to keep up with the Russians?” So there was this huge demand for science explainers or for science popularisers. Asimov was uniquely suited to be that person because he was incredibly intelligent, he had this knack for translating complex concepts into simple language, and he was insanely productive. I talked about the 400 books he wrote: the vast majority of those are nonfiction. He didn’t write a lot of novels by the standards of the pulp writers for that period, but he wrote hundreds of nonfiction books – mostly on the sciences, but then later on other subjects, because he developed this voice and this technique for taking information from reference books and translating them into language that ordinary readers could understand. Once he had set up the system for doing this, he could just crank out books at this incredible pace for decades. So when you talk about his fame, his celebrity status as a writer, I would say it mostly came from the science writing, the nonfiction writing. For a long time, science fiction was still a subculture, and the works didn’t appeal to the mainstream as much as they do now. But the science writing, and his status as someone who could go on TV and talk about these subjects – that was a huge part of the reason he became so well known.

Let’s talk about his nonfiction – your fourth recommendation is Asimov’s New Guide To Science.

So I did have to just pick one out of hundreds, and this is one that is on my shelf. This was originally published under the title The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science, which was not Asimov’s title. He didn’t really like it, and then, as he revised it later on, he called it Asimov’s Guide to Science. And finally, Asimov’s New Guide to Science.

It essentially covers all of science. It is 900 pages long, and it was as complete a guide to the sciences as one could buy in 1984, which is when it came out. The first reason I wanted to talk about it is that if you’re curious about science, there’s a massive amount of material here that you’ll find interesting. But to me, it also testifies to his talents. I recently finished a book that is a biography of Luis W Alvarez, who was a Manhattan Project physicist, another fascinating figure, and it required me to learn a lot of physics. That’s not really my background, and this was my first full-on science biography. So I would often encounter a concept I didn’t know well, or where I needed a refresher. And honestly, the first thing I did was look at what Asimov wrote – because I know it’s going to be accurate, I know it’s going to be clear and easy to understand, and I know it’s going to be fun to read. So even though I have access to forty ensuing years of science popularisations, I come back to this book a lot, because he really was something special when it came to explaining things to people. I was struck by this fact – that despite the fact that I have access to all kinds of resources to write a book about science, Asimov was still the best explainer when it came to this material.

That’s a great pitch – I certainly have some knowledge gaps to fill…

And there’s Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, Asimov’s Guide to the Bible… I mean, there are very few topics where there’s not a book he wrote, that you could read and learn a lot from and have a good time doing it.

Your final choice is a different kind of nonfiction: Asimov’s two-volume memoir, starting with In Memory Yet Green. Could you introduce us?

This is my favourite Asimov book. It is something of a personal choice, because I came to Asimov recently as a science fiction historian, and so obviously his memoirs were of great interest to me. But these are remarkable books.

These were the first two volumes of his memoirs. They came out in 1979 and 1980, so he still had over a decade left to go. They are huge books. In Memory Yet Green, the first volume, is over 700 pages, and In Joy Still Felt,  volume two, is 800 pages, in small font. They really cover what almost at times feels like every day of his life, as if he kept a detailed diary. A lot of the entries are very mundane things: he took the car to the shop to get it repaired, or he fixed up his office… but it’s incredibly compelling. And I think it’s a testament to his voice, which is unmatched. He’s a very conversational writer.

Also, the material is fascinating if you’re a writer, or if you are interested in the life of a writer, especially from this period. For that, it’s one of the best books imaginable. It’s full of good gossip and interesting stories about all the writers from that period. It’s full of incredible material on Campbell and that circle and on what it meant to be a person like this – what kind of personality could write 400 books over the course of his career? I was looking at the book last night, and I couldn’t stop – you start reading, especially the second volume, and it’s just so interesting. So as a biographer, it was an incredible source of material, not just on him, but on the entire world of science fiction.

I will say there’s one thing, and this is probably the best place to mention it… Asimov is very candid; he talks a lot about his personal life and his personal behaviour in ways that are meant to be a little bit self-deprecating. He’s got this act he puts on, where he’s this bumbling genius who can be helpless in social situations. But he talks very candidly about his behaviour toward women, and it was very troubling. He was a groper. He engaged in unwanted touching for decades with, I would say, hundreds of women, mostly young fans at conventions, secretaries and people he met in private. He touched them in ways that were unforgivable. I’ve read a lot of accounts from recipients of these attentions and they say it was traumatizing. So that is a known fact about Asimov, and I have to say it, I have to bring it up when I talk about him. The interesting thing is that he talks about it in these books – if you’re looking for material to support that reading of his life, it’s all right here. He was very open about it. It was treated as a kind of running joke at conventions, that he was this dirty old man who would grab at woman’s bottoms. And I’m still working through the implications of this, because I don’t do it to the extent that I should have in Astounding. So, elsewhere, I’ve been trying to talk about it… It is not controversial to say that this happened. This is something that Asimov himself talks about throughout his memoirs and acknowledges, and yet it took a long time for people to actually start to grapple with it.

Yes, that’s definitely a side we don’t hear of as much…

One thing that I’m really struck by about Asimov, having read so much of him, is that he’s a much more complex figure than people understand. I think he became very good at playing a certain role. During his life, he was a sort of ambassador of science fiction to the mainstream. At conventions, he was the toastmaster, the life of the party. But this came out of someone who I think, deep down, had a lot of unresolved feelings about himself and about other people. His fiction is limited in some ways by this fact. He has trouble writing women; there are very few good female characters in these stories. What we look for in fiction, the world building, the prose…. It’s not always at the same level as someone like Heinlein, who is working at the same time and is a much more engaging writer in some ways. But Asimov was unmatched when it came to ideas. The ideas in these stories and in his nonfiction are still incredibly exciting. I would not dissuade anyone for a second from looking at him – as a source of insight into the sciences, into history, and into a huge range of subjects that he thought about and was able to explain more clearly than just about anybody else.